by Tim Birkhead
Seeing ‘purposefulness’ in nature had been widespread even before the first century ad, but it gained increasing popularity during the medieval period.5 Once Francis Bacon set the scientific revolution in motion in the early 1600s, this so-called natural theology was forced to change because of the ways in which scholars now acquired information. Logic, direct observation and experiment not only challenged the established ‘knowledge’ of ancient authors, it also challenged the existence of God. The magnitude of this change is reflected in the fact that by 1660 no fewer than ten books on natural theology had been published, because of the need for many to marry the new science’s reason with Christian views. Natural theology, or physico-theology as it was also known, provided that union, using the natural world as evidence both for the existence of God but also for His power and wisdom.
Ray, interested in both the purpose and interpretation of knowledge, embraced natural theology with enthusiasm and read many of the recently published books on the topic. Their titles, including John Wilkins’s Reason and Christianity (1649), Walter Charleton’s The Darkness of Atheism dispelled by the light of Reason (1652), and his Cambridge colleague Henry More’s An Antidote against Atheism (1653), all reflect the widespread concern that the new science was fostering atheism. Ray was galvanised by More’s proposal that the sophisticated design so apparent in all animals and plants, together with the way their design fitted them to a particular environment, constituted evidence for the existence of God. So taken was Ray with these ideas in the 1650s that he used them as the basis for some sermons, or ‘morning divinity exercises’, that he delivered at Trinity College chapel in the 1650s.6
Ray may also have been influenced by a less well-known book by the Flemish Jesuit, Leonardus Lessius, The providence of God and the immortality of the soul. Published first in 1631 and reprinted in 1651, Lessius’s book sought evidence for the existence of God in the motion of the heavens, the beauty of natural phenomena and – like Henry More – in the purposefulness of animal and plant design. Of insects, for example, Lessius wrote: ‘All parts or members in them are wonderfully faire, all most perfectly agreeing and fitting to the functions, for which they were made.’ The inescapable conclusion for the perfect fit or design was that there is ‘a most wyse and divine Providence’.7 The English translation of Lessius’s book, with the unlikely title of Raleigh his Ghost, reveals it to be a polemic against atheism and those allowing religious dissent in the name of civic peace, while at the same time providing evidence for the existence of God. The evidence takes two forms: God’s punishment of sinners, and more positively, the link between animal form and function.8 It is not known for certain whether Ray read Lessius, but the book was in Trinity’s library, so it seems possible that he did; he may have been wary of advertising the fact given Lessius’s Catholicism and the existing animosity between Protestants and Catholics.
Another thing that prompted Ray to find a way of combining divinity and natural philosophy was the mechanistic philosophy of René Descartes. A key player in the scientific revolution, his main thesis was that ours was a mechanistic universe in which all phenomena could be explained by physical laws. He saw animals as machines, mere automata, and therefore – in contrast to man – incapable of consciousness, physical sensation or emotions. His argument was partly designed to place humans above and distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom, but for someone like Ray with considerable first-hand experience of the natural world, this simply wouldn’t do. Later, in a powerful and poignant attack on Descartes’s mechanistic ideas, Ray was to ask rhetorically, ‘Why, if they are incapable of experiencing pain, do dogs cry out during vivisection?’9
Francis Willughby must have heard Ray’s sermons on design and the two of them may well have discussed those ideas. Indeed, I can imagine such conversations adding fuel to Willughby’s germinating interest in the natural world. Essentially, Ray’s physico-theology focused on the purposefulness of nature and why things are the way they are. His position is nicely encapsulated by a phrase he used when he later published his ideas: ‘that the material works of God are wisely contrived and adapted to ends both general and particular’.10 Why, for example, does a swan have a long neck, short legs and webbed feet? The answer, Ray tells us, is so that it can feed on submerged plants while swimming on the surface of the water: God’s wonderful design.
Explaining the natural world as the result of God’s wisdom has – as this example shows – the potential of being facile and teleological, but this was not the way Ray generally argued his case. In asking, for example, why different bird species breed at different times, Ray suggests that this ensures their young are reared and fledge when food for that particular species (my emphasis) is most abundant, again thanks to God’s wisdom. In this instance – and in contrast to his predecessors such as More or Lessius – his answer contains some genuine biological insight and, as studies in the twentieth century eventually showed, is basically correct.11 The fact that Ray was right about the pattern (if not the process – God’s wisdom) could be viewed as an example of what historians of science refer to as ‘Whiggism’ – distorting history through the use of hindsight to selectively identify discoveries important for modern science.12 In fact, John Ray’s observations so often anticipated later findings that there is little risk of our being Whiggish in our assessment of him.
I have a lot of sympathy with Ray and his colleagues who saw God’s wisdom as an explanation for the natural world. Today’s scientists, however, have little time for Ray’s physico-theology and the idea of a God-inspired world, but I can appreciate just how seductive this notion was to the seventeenth century’s new philosophers: God’s wisdom seemed to make sense and explain so much. But it didn’t explain everything, as Ray himself acknowledged, and indeed, long after he and Willughby were dead, when the notion of natural selection came along in the nineteenth century, it replaced the idea of a God-directed universe precisely because it explained so much more. This is the way science proceeds: old ideas are replaced by better ones, based on evidence. In the minds of some, physico-theology and the centrality of ‘God’ lingers on in the form of ‘intelligent design’, a position based on conviction rather than evidence and logic.
Ray’s preoccupation with science began with botany, no doubt inspired by his mother’s interest in medicinal plants when he was a child. Sometime in the early 1650s, in his late twenties, Ray had been ill, both physically and mentally – stressed and frightened by the difficult political situation – and was forced to take a break from his studies. Part of his recuperation included walking and riding, pastimes that provided him with the ‘leisure to contemplate … what lay constantly before the eyes and were so often trodden thoughtlessly under foot, the various beauty of plants, the cunning craftsmanship of nature’.13 He eventually decided to catalogue all the plants of the Cambridge countryside – to create a local flora. This was far more ambitious than it now seems, for the existing books were all but useless and Ray had little choice but to start from scratch and perfect his own identification skills. He collected specimens, and either dried them as reference material or kept them alive, cultivating them in his tiny Trinity garden. Ray was also keen to encourage friends to share his pursuits,14 and three Cambridge colleagues – John Nidd, Peter Courthope and Francis Willughby – all helped, most probably by finding plants for him. It was inevitable that while walking or riding together they discussed broader botanical issues such as the validity of the doctrine of signatures; whether all plants reproduce by seed; the meaning of tree rings; and most significantly of all, what constitutes a species.15
The doctrine of signatures was an idea dating back to the days of Pliny the Elder and developed in the sixteenth century by the Swiss-German physician Paracelsus, suggesting that the growth form of a plant comprises a sign or signature regarding its curative properties. Lungwort, for example, with its pale-spotted leaves, resembles a human lung and hence signals its suitability as a cure for lung disease. Similarly, the r
oots of certain orchids resemble human genitals and thus provide an obvious cure for sexual problems. Much of it was nonsense of course, but in Willughby and Ray’s day, the belief that God – the creator and healer – had placed those plants on earth for a purpose made a great deal of sense. And of course, as is now apparent, many of those remedies really worked.
In total, Ray collected and identified no fewer than 558 Cambridgeshire plants, publishing his results in 1660 as the Cambridge Catalogue. In the Preface he wrote: ‘We would urge men of University standing to spare a brief interval from other pursuits for the study of nature and of the vast library of creation’. He continues: ‘Surely we can admit that even if, as things are, such studies do not greatly conduce to wealth or human favour, there is for a free man no occupation more worthy and delightful than to contemplate the beauteous works of nature and honour the infinite wisdom and goodness of God.’ He adds: ‘Of course there are people entirely indifferent to the sight of flowers … or if not indifferent at least pre-occupied elsewhere … they devote themselves to ball-games, to drinking, gambling, money-making, popularity-hunting. For these our subject is meaningless.’ He continues:
We offer a hundred banquets to the Pythagoreans or rather the true philosophers whose concern is not so much to know what authors think as to gaze with their own eyes on the nature of things and to listen with their own ears to her voice; who prefer quality to quantity, and usefulness to pretension.16
It is clear that Ray’s engagement with the natural world was not solely academic; it was also spiritual, emotional and aesthetic:
First I was fascinated and then absorbed by the rich spectacle of the meadows in spring-time; then I was filled with wonder and delight by the marvellous shape, colour and structure of the individual plants. While my eyes feasted on these sights, my mind too was stimulated. I became inspired with a passion for Botany, and I conceived a burning desire to become proficient in that study, from which I promised myself much innocent pleasure to soothe my solitude.17
I can hear Ray uttering these very words to Willughby as they botanised together, and it isn’t difficult to see how Ray’s passion for natural history ignited Willughby’s. Their joint excursions must have brought the two men closer together; the younger Willughby in awe perhaps of Ray’s knowledge and clarity of thought; the older man in awe of Willughby’s social status, but probably even more, his receptivity, aptitude and sharpness of wit.
As well as botany, other practical activities helped to shape Francis’s intellectual development. These included anatomy, inspired by the works of William Harvey on the circulation of the blood, and on the reproduction and development of animals; and by Descartes’s ‘mechanistic’ view of nature. The new scientists at Trinity College – John Ray, Isaac Barrow, Walter Needham and John Nidd – were intrigued by the internal structure of animals, and on one occasion at least and probably with Willughby present too, they dissected several birds including a bittern, a curlew and a ‘yarwhelp’.18 Ray commented that ‘The yarwhelp is a name I never read or heard of before or since.’ It was in fact the East Anglian name for the bar-tailed godwit and clearly distinguished from the similar black-tailed godwit, which was then referred to simply as the godwit.19 It seems likely that the group also anatomised other animals (but not humans) and that it was at Trinity where Francis Willughby and John Ray acquired their fascination and aptitude for dissection.
The idea of John Ray, Francis Willughby and friends dissecting a bittern in John Nidd’s rooms caught my imagination. I have dissected many birds myself, and I began to fantasise about what that must have been like and decided to relive the occasion by dissecting my own bittern. Easier said than done. The bittern is not only a rare bird in Britain, it is also extremely secretive and more often heard than seen. Its booming call was well known in Willughby’s day, as the reedbeds on which the species depends were more extensive then. Drainage of the fens and wetlands subsequently drove the bittern to extinction as a British breeding bird in the late 1800s. Since then it has become re-established and now, through careful conservation, the population in Britain numbers some 150 booming males. The bittern population is counted as the number of calling males rather than as pairs because the species is both polygamous and impossible to see and count inside their Phragmites reedbeds.
Dead birds are often handed in to museums, so I enquired whether any museum in the United Kingdom had a bittern in their freezer, but none had. I next asked the managers of reserves where bitterns breed if they had a dead one: none did. But then, to my amazement, a few weeks later a reserve manager called me to say he had just found a bittern that had died after colliding with some overhead wires.
My first reaction on seeing the bird was how small it seemed. Small, but magnificent. Having watched bitterns magnified through binoculars or a telescope, one’s brain is duped into expecting a larger bird. This is a bird with golden, star-spangled plumage; a dagger-like bill; leaf-green skin on the upper eyelid and gun-metal blue beneath. Its long, lime-green legs are tipped with elongated toes terminating in extraordinarily long claws, one of which is exquisitely serrated. All these features are adaptations for a life among the reeds; the bird’s plumage provides protection through camouflage; its beak and claws enable the bittern to spear and hold the slithering eels on which it feeds; and those long legs, toes and claws allow the bittern to clamber confidently through its thatch-like reedy habitat. The serrated middle claw is thought to help remove eel slime from the bittern’s plumage.
The bittern’s physical features noted by Willughby eventually appeared in the Ornithology. As well as the bird examined in Nidd’s rooms, he and Ray scrutinised others, including one whose irises were ‘hazel incline[d] to yellow’ and another with red eyes. Willughby also comments on the bittern’s large ear opening, which I also made a point of looking at by parting the feathers behind the eye. The bittern’s ear is unusual in that it is an oval of bare, blue-purple skin with a relatively small opening, suggesting to me that there might be something special about the bittern’s hearing – possibly linked with its exceptionally loud call.20
The bittern’s booming has been likened to ‘the lowings of an ox’21 and accounts for the first part of its scientific name Botaurus stellaris, from ‘bos’, meaning ox, and ‘taurus’, meaning bull. The name stellaris refers to the starred or mottled plumage. Willughby calls it the ‘Bittour or bittern or mire-drum’. ‘Bittour’ is Old English, and Chaucer in the Wife of Bath’s Tale mentions that ‘a Bittour bumbleth in the mire’.
I haven’t quite finished with the bittern’s external appearance. Parting the buff and streaky breast feathers, I expose two well-concealed patches that at first sight look like shaggy, white fabric, covering much of the bird’s breast. These patches are so striking and so unlike anything I’ve ever seen on any bird before, I cannot quite believe that neither Willughby nor Ray commented on them. They are well concealed, but knowing how meticulous Willughby was with his examinations and descriptions, I’m still surprised that he overlooked them or missed reporting them. These are patches of highly modified feathers known as powder-down, designed to disintegrate almost as soon as they emerge from the skin, generating a coarse talcum-like dust thought to aid the waterproofing of the feathers. It probably also helps to coat the copious slime from the eels on which bitterns feed, so that it can more easily be removed from the plumage.
Inside the bittern I discover an out-of-season ovary (the bird died in early December), attached to a surprisingly large oviduct, indicating that this was a mature female. Willughby describes the windpipe or trachea with its incomplete cartilage rings; the two-lobed liver, the stomach ‘of a singular structure, and of the figure of the letter S’, but, curiously, he makes no comment on the gut itself. I knew from an earlier account that the bittern has a long alimentary canal. ‘Five ells long’ is how that previous writer describes it. An ell was a German unit of measurement, generally meaning the distance from a man’s elbow to his fingertips, or about forty
centimetres. So five ells is two metres, and sure enough when I carefully freed my bittern’s gut from its connective tissue, and stretched it out, it was indeed two metres in length. Once again, I was surprised that Willughby had not noticed this. The nineteenth-century ornithologist William MacGillivray used – very much in the Willughby tradition – anatomical features to classify birds and recognised that a long, narrow gut was a characteristic feature of the heron family, to which the bittern belongs.22
Among the various extra-curricular activities Willughby and Ray engaged in at Trinity College was ‘chymistry’, a field of investigation closely allied with medicine, and whose unfamiliar name reflects its slightly uncertain position between alchemy and chemistry. The study of chymistry and the use of chemicals in the preparation of medical remedies had been pioneered by Paracelsus. Although little known, chymistry appears to have been popular among certain of the new scientists at Trinity, including Willughby and Ray. Others involved were Alexander Akehurst, the vice-master of Trinity (who in 1654 was ejected for blasphemous statements); Daniel Foote, admitted as a sizar in 1655, the year before Willughby; Francis Jessop (admitted in 1654), whose wide range of interests included ornithology; Thomas Pockley, another of Willughby’s contemporaries, who was, in addition to being a chymistry enthusiast, passionate about anatomy; and John Nidd, another anatomy enthusiast whose chymistry books were much in demand by his friends.23 After Willughby and the others had left Cambridge, Trinity’s tradition of ex-curricular chymistry continued with Isaac Newton in the 1660s.