by Tim Birkhead
More broadly, Duport advised his tutees to ‘Write frequently to your Parents & Friends, to ye former especially if you know they desire you & expect it’; to ‘Walk often in the fields, and to walke alone; for that put good thoughts into you, & make you retire into your self and commune with your own heart’; and perhaps most poignantly of all, to ‘Think every day to be your last, and spend it accordingly.’
You cannot help but like the man.
Duport’s rules of conduct were not solely for his students while at university; they were a guide to life itself and especially appropriate for those who, like Francis Willughby, continued to study long after leaving Cambridge. Judging from the account that Willughby’s daughter left of her father’s subsequent daily routine, it is clear that he assiduously followed his tutor’s advice in keeping set hours for study.22
Conversely, Duport’s firm advice about avoiding cards or dice may have ignited in Willughby a subliminal rebellious streak. The university’s statutes were explicit: ‘If anyone is detected as having even once taken part in a game of chance, let him be expelled from the College for ever.’ Within a year or two of leaving university Francis had developed – as we will see later – a fascination for games of chance, albeit as a researcher rather than a gamester.
Among Duport’s various suggestions for how to study, perhaps the most important was the keeping of a commonplace book. This was a way of collecting and organising knowledge; a sophisticated, personal scrapbook of information that was neither diary nor journal. A commonplace book served as a highly organised aide-memoire in which information was placed under sets of headings identified by the owner depending on his course of study.
Remarkably, Willughby’s commonplace book has survived and provides a revealing window onto his Cambridge education. He had apparently obtained this substantial leather-bound book second-hand, for some of the handwriting indicates that it started life as a legal commonplace book. As was typical of commonplace books, Willughby introduced numerous headings relating to his reading under which he then added quotations, notes and references to his sources.
Despite their essential role in helping scholars to organise their knowledge, a major limitation of the commonplace book was, as anyone who has kept a notebook knows, its inflexibility. As pages on particular topics fill up, new pages, not necessarily continuous, need to be started, creating a fragmented account. To deal with this, Willughby later produced an index for himself on a separate sheet of paper.
Another improvement, suggested by the ardently Royalist scholar Thomas Harrison in the 1640s, was to keep notes on separate slips of paper (anticipating the twentieth-century index-card system) that could be filed together. Despite being hailed by some, including the polymath Samuel Hartlib, as a major advance in the organisation of information, Harrison’s method was one that few appeared to follow up, almost certainly because the slips of paper lacked the permanence and convenience of a bound notebook.23
Seeing Willughby’s commonplace book in the Middleton Collection at the University of Nottingham for the first time, I was surprised by its sheer size. With around 300 A4-sized pages and weighing 1.5 kilograms, this was a book for someone seriously interested in taking notes. The brown leather cover possesses a beautiful 350-year-old patina, while inside, Francis’s distinctive handwriting – in dark and sometimes pale brown ink distilled from oak galls – spiders its way across the pages in hurried enthusiasm. Just as I do when testing a ballpoint pen for my own notebooks, Willughby had tested his quill inside the back cover, creating a pattern of random scribbles resembling those on the eggs of certain birds.
Much of what Willughby has written looks utterly illegible, and is not helped, in my case, by being mostly in Latin. My colleague Richard Serjeantson – a Trinity Fellow himself – is proficient in both Latin and the deciphering of illegible hands, and has been able to translate much of Francis’s scrawl. As he so aptly said, the handwriting ‘consistently gives the impression of someone who does not wish you to suppose that he had labored over his penmanship’.24 In some ways this is not surprising: this was Willughby’s notebook, for his use alone, and so as long as he could read it, that was sufficient.
Pages from Francis Willughby’s commonplace book.
Not only is the handwriting difficult to interpret, so too is the content, for the information Francis recorded is often extremely brief. Nonetheless, Serjeantson’s careful examination revealed that during almost the entire time Willughby was at Cambridge, he returned to his commonplace book again and again to add notes on what he had read. It is striking how closely Francis followed Duport’s advice: ‘Transcribe not whole sayings & stories at length, for that is tedious and Endless; but make short references to Book and Page.’25
Duport further suggested that when studying a particular book, students should read it through in its entirety and in doing so ‘observe ye most remarkable passages and note them with a black lead pen [pencil] and afterward refer to them in ye commonplace booke’. That Willughby followed this advice is clear from the annotations he later made in his copy of the Theatre of Insects, whose author, Thomas Muffet, we shall meet later.26 In this instance, Francis’s comments are brief, or comprise simple marginal marks that highlight issues of particular interest, and contrary to Duport’s advice they are in ink rather than pencil.
A decade after Willughby left Trinity, James Duport wrote a poem about him, as he did for many of his friends and tutees, in which he anticipated how passionately Francis would pursue his studies:
I foresaw this long ago at Trinity College
(where you too, as Noblemen are not accustomed to do,
Eagerly taking both degrees, have adorned the Gown for a very long time),
What a glutton for books and culture
You would be: for there I remember well
That for you, panting heavily for education,
Hastening to acquire skills with too swift a foot,
There was a need for reins, not for spurs.27
It was true. When Francis graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in January 1656, he was top of his year and ranked above every other student at the university. Exactly what this means is slightly unclear, because the order in which graduating students were listed was determined largely by their social standing rather than their academic prowess. Yet in Willughby’s case it seems his position at the head of the list reflected both.28
As was becoming increasingly obvious, Willughby had a taste for study, and after acquiring his BA – itself unusual among Fellow-commoners – he remained at Trinity to pursue a Master of Arts, which he completed with similar facility some three years later.29 Judging from the entries in his commonplace book, gaining his BA marked a transition in Francis’s reading. Rather abruptly, around 1655–6, he began a course of study focusing largely on the new science, reading Galileo, Henry More, Thomas Hobbes, William Gilbert, more of Francis Bacon, and of course Descartes. This may not simply have been due to the realisation that he enjoyed and excelled in academic endeavour. Change was in the air at Trinity, where the gradual shift from old to new philosophy was gathering pace and would very soon supplant it. This was ‘the most radical change in theory and the most fruitful in practice’.30
Written like this it sounds much less exciting than it undoubtedly was. However, I can vouch for how exhilarating this must have been, for I have lived through a similar change in my own area of science. I will try to explain. Following, rather distantly, along the path first cleared by Willughby and Ray through the tangled complexities of natural history, in the early 1800s Charles Darwin came up with the idea of ‘transmutation’ or evolution, mediated through the process of natural selection. The idea, presented in his book On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, changed the way we view the natural world, and Darwinian evolutionary thinking has been the bedrock of almost all natural history research ever since. But exactly how natural selection worked remained unclear. Then, in the mid-1960s, after a century of new knowle
dge, the mechanism started to become apparent. Natural selection operated on individual organisms rather than on populations or entire species as was once thought. The result was the biggest change in twentieth-century biology. During the early 1970s zoologist Richard Dawkins at Oxford wrote The Selfish Gene to make this new thinking on ‘individual selection’ – which he caricatured as ‘selfish’ – accessible to a wide audience. I was fortunate enough to be a D.Phil. student in Oxford during this time, and attended seminars in which Dawkins tried out his still unpublished chapters and introduced us to these new ideas. There was a strong sense that something extraordinary was happening in biology – as if a bright new horizon were opening. The new science of ‘individual selection’ created a new world of opportunities that allowed me, and other young researchers, to make sense of those parts of the natural world we were studying (birds in my case), which had previously seemed obscure. Willughby and his colleagues must have felt exactly like this too in the 1650s as their new science began to emerge.31
Predictably, as with any major change in thinking, the old guard in Willughby’s day was sceptical and suspicious; and too set in their ways, perhaps, to learn new tricks. But that scepticism was important for refining the ideas, for sharpening thinking and ensuring that the new science did not go off half-cock.32 Duport, almost thirty years older than Francis, was certainly wary of the new science, and good-humouredly chided him for what he considered his infatuation with Descartes, astronomy and botany:
Let not the new Philosophers, my Friend, please you too much.33
In truth, Duport was not hostile to these new ideas, but he was concerned that they might eclipse ‘more polite learning’ and religion.34 There is even a suggestion that Duport may have been secretly persuaded by his tutees, Francis Willughby, John Ray and Isaac Barrow, that the new science was important, for after his death, Duport’s library was found to contain a number of scientific books, all of which were either purchased or published after the new science had become established.35
Duport’s ‘chiding’ of Willughby may have been motivated as much by his concern over his tutee’s health as his fear of a new thinking. Bitten by the snake of learning, Francis threw himself into his studies, but Duport, seeing his tutee’s unquenchable thirst for the new science, was concerned for his well-being. Duport’s long career as a caring tutor must have allowed him to recognise both Willughby’s delicate constitution and the dangers that such single-mindedness posed. Later he wrote another poem for Francis expressing his fear:
Desist a little, grant a pause to knowledge;
How long will you torment yourself with Empirical Studies
And with Botanical skill, yielding the field to no one?
Be mindful, I entreat you, also of the Ancient Sage,
Nothing in excess: certainly there is a limit to knowledge too;
The dropsy of learning is a kind of intemperance.
Lay down your bow, which if it is stretched too much
Will immediately be broken: Look after your little body,
That which is certainly not made of iron or of steel,
Nor mighty in strength, but quite feeble:
Have consideration for yourself; take care of and cherish your skin.36
There is no evidence that Willughby heeded Duport’s advice regarding his health, but he did seek friendship among those with similar values, and this meant that his friends were likewise infected by the new science. One of those he became particularly close to was his cousin, Peter Courthope.37 The two travelled together – for unknown reasons – sometime in 1658, and clearly got on well. So much so that Francis later entreated Courthope to join him on his subsequent travels, but without success.
Philip Skippon arrived at Trinity in 1655 and despite his family’s rather different political background – Skippon’s father, Sir Philip Skippon, had been Cromwell’s major-general during the Civil War – Francis and he quickly became friends. Skippon also became friends with Courthope.
Another ally was Nathaniel Bacon, a Fellow-commoner at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. Described as a ‘resty fellow’, Bacon was a lazy student who ‘broke out into some extravagancies’, causing his father to take him home. Bacon was rescued by his Trinity tutor, John Ray, who Bacon’s father employed to provide private tuition, with the result that within a few years Nathaniel was sufficiently improved that he was to spend many months as Willughby’s travelling companion.38
Of all those he met at Trinity, Willughby’s greatest friend was John Ray. They were to work together for much of the next decade or so in what was to become one of the great partnerships in biology. Theirs was an extraordinary collaboration and, as we will see in the following chapter, neither of them would have been as productive without the other.
2
John Ray and the Cunning Craftsmanship of Nature
More likenesses of John Ray exist than of Francis Willughby, as is fitting for someone who over five decades of research and writing helped – with Willughby – to change the face of natural history. Yet only two of these portraits were done from life. Both show Ray as a rather sick man in his sixties, making him look much older than his age. What’s more, our perception of the relationship between Ray and Willughby feels to me distorted by their respective portraits: Ray in his sixties; Willughby, as we will see, in his twenties, exaggerating the eight-year difference in their true ages and reinforcing the widespread perception of Ray’s intellectual seniority. The better of Ray’s two portraits, executed in coloured chalk by William Faithorne around 1690, shows Ray to be slightly built, with a long, downward-sloping nose, a wispy grey moustache, grey shoulder-length hair and olive-brown eyes. He stares, somewhat quizzically, at the viewer, such that I see a serious-minded, somewhat impatient sitter, and someone I am unable to envision as a young man.
Faithorne’s somewhat impressionistic portrait was almost certainly commissioned so that engravings could be made from it, and Ray must have judged it a reasonable likeness, for it is the one that serves – as an engraving – as the frontispiece to several of his books. Yet I found the difference between the smudgy colour image and the hard-lined engraved images disconcerting. With only the chalk image to go on, the engravers seem to have enjoyed some artistic freedom, elaborating where elaboration was probably not needed. Subsequent engravers made renderings of previous engravings in a visual version of Chinese whispers, such that the portraits become less and less of a likeness.1
John Ray, an engraving by William Elder (1694) based reasonably closely on Faithorne’s coloured chalk portrait (c. 1690).
John Ray – spelt Wray until 1670, when he dropped the ‘W’ to facilitate Latinising his name – was Francis Willughby’s most important intellectual ally at Trinity College. They met for the first time in 1653, two terms after Willughby first came up to Cambridge. Ray was to become such a significant feature in Francis’s life that it is impossible to think about the latter without also knowing about the former.
Ray’s father, Roger, was a blacksmith – a craftsman and crucial member of a community dependent on horsepower. John’s mother, Elizabeth, was a ‘herb-woman’ – a collector of medicinal plants. It was from her that he acquired his love for plants, and from his father, a fascination for how things were constructed. John Ray was born on 29 November 1627 at Black Notley in Essex and, presumably because his parents understood the value of a good education, he was later sent to Braintree Grammar School. There, recognising his talent and aptitude, Samuel Collins, Vicar of Braintree, encouraged Ray in his studies and arranged for him to go up to Cambridge at the age of sixteen on 12 May 1644. For unknown reasons, however, the anticipated position at Trinity College never materialised. Undaunted, the ever-vigilant Collins found a bequest that provided Ray with a scholarship at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, which he entered a month later. After two years, and realising that St Catharine’s had failed to provide Ray with the intellectual stimulation he needed, Collins intervened once again and arranged for
him to transfer – successfully this time – to Trinity College on 21 November 1646, where, as sizar, he became the tutee of James Duport.
It is perhaps not surprising that Ray should become friends with another student entering Trinity that same year, the sixteen-year-old Isaac Barrow. Previously, at Charterhouse School, Barrow had distinguished himself only as the school ruffian, despite the fact that his father had paid the headmaster Robert Brooke double fees to keep his son in check. Barrow senior’s utter despair at his son’s pugilistic tendencies is clear from the fact that he ‘often solemnly wished, that if it pleased God to take away any of his children it might be his son Isaac’.2 Isaac Barrow entered Trinity as a sub-sizar, also under the tutorship of James Duport, and he and Ray may have shared rooms. Duport later described Ray and Barrow as ‘the two most brilliant pupils of his whole career’.3
Ray obtained his BA in 1647/8, and a minor fellowship the next year, followed by a succession of Trinity College posts including Lecturer in Greek (1651), Mathematics (1653) and Humanities (1655), becoming college steward in 1659. During his time as mathematics lecturer Ray arranged for Francis Willughby to be tutored by Barrow. Mathematics was a central part of the Cambridge curriculum, and two better teachers would have been hard to find. It is no coincidence that as part of his wholesale acceptance of the new science in which mathematics played such a pivotal role, Francis should strive – as is clear from the extensive if almost undecipherable notes in his commonplace book – to become an effective mathematician. Willughby and Barrow formed a close relationship; they regularly ate together at Trinity, and when in 1655 Barrow published his edition of Euclid’s Elements, he dedicated it to Willughby, together with two other students, Edward Cecil and John Knatchbull. The numerical skills that Francis acquired as a result were later reflected in his studies of games – in particular the ‘doctrine of chances’ in dice and cards – and in his bold attempt to solve a high-profile mathematical problem on motion.4