by Tim Birkhead
Wilkins’s proposed solution to this linguistic confusion was to create a kind of scientific Esperanto by which everyone would know ‘things’. His extraordinarily ambitious plan was to develop a philosophical language based on ‘real characters’, rather like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters, to represent specific things or notions. However, for nature to be represented by a system of symbols, it was essential to discover the elements upon which all natural phenomena were based. Wilkins recognised that creating a philosophical language required a model of the natural world, and for seventeenth-century scientists that model was classification – the ordering of nature. The new science needed a new language just as much as a new language needed science.
The key to the new science was the organisation of knowledge. Although the scientific revolution sought to overturn much of Aristotle’s thinking, it was, at the same time, based on two fundamental Aristotelian assumptions. First, that there was order in nature. Second, the idea of an organism’s ‘essence’ – what made it it.
For Francis Bacon and the philosophers who followed in his footsteps, that order had been imposed by God and was deeply embedded in Christian belief. It was a belief that order lay at the end of the rainbow. If order existed then it could be discovered, and discovering order was the basis of the new science. Discovery, however, depended on an objective way of interrogating the natural world and this meant that science needed a ‘method’. In natural history it needed a methodology that allowed one to identify the ‘essence’ of things, that is, what, for example, made one bird species similar to another, yet distinct from others? Only by knowing such things could one impose order, and for seventeenth-century natural historians such as Willughby and Ray, classification was to become their core activity. For the physical scientists on the other hand, such as Descartes and Newton, mathematics was what enabled them to verify the existence of order in the natural world. Order was uppermost in many people’s minds. The Civil War had created monumental and awful disorder, so consciously or unconsciously the quest for order was paramount and classification and quantification became the foundation of the new science.
The restoration of the monarchy in May 1660 brought Wilkins’s Cambridge career to an abrupt end when the position gifted to him by Cromwell was retracted. Wilkins eventually bounced back, becoming Bishop of Chester in 1668, the same year that his ‘universal language’ project – of which more later – was published.
Ray, meanwhile, was still at Trinity, continuing with his botanical studies, and preparing his Cambridge Catalogue. Over the previous years he had carefully documented not only the plant species that flourished in the Cambridge countryside, but also the habitats – woods, bogs or meadows – they occupied. The text of Ray’s modest book is interspersed with intriguing anecdotes, including the idea that tree rings accurately reflect the age of a tree: ‘My opinion is that so long as the tree is alive, it adds a new ring, even if it is a narrow one, every year’; how the shape of a tree is influenced by the prevailing winds; that gastropods (slugs and snails) were hermaphrodites; that rose bedegaur galls, also known as robin’s pincushion, contain tiny white maggots that emerge as flies ‘like those of winged ants’ (the maggots are known now to be the larvae of the gall wasp Diplolepis rosae); and, finally, that after pupation the caterpillars of the large white butterfly give rise either to a butterfly or to numerous tiny worms that in turn spin cocoons, from which emerge ‘flies, black all over with reddish legs and long antennae, and about the size of a small ant’.4
Published anonymously in February 1660, the Cambridge Catalogue acknowledged the help that Ray had received in the field from Francis Willughby and his friend Peter Courthope. Given the many exciting discoveries they made together, it is perhaps not surprising that Willughby, for one, became completely enthused by natural history.
This enthusiasm resulted in Willughby and Ray undertaking several journeys together. Their first was in August 1660 when they headed north on horseback to Halifax, through Keighley to Settle and on into the Lake District, then to Ravenglass where they crossed the sea to Ramsey on the Isle of Man. From there they visited the Calf of Man, a tiny island (that now has a bird observatory) lying about a third of a mile off the south-west end of the main island. It was on the Calf that Willughby saw and described ‘the puffin of the Isle of Man’ taken out of a nest. The bird in question was the Manx shearwater, and the individual Willughby saw was a nestling, whose extraordinary appearance as a ball of copious grey down with a beak cannot but have impressed him.
Manx shearwater Puffinus puffinus: it was a chick probably at this stage of development that Willughby and Ray saw on the Calf of Man.
Today, fluffy shearwater chicks are considered ‘cute’, but I doubt Willughby thought like that. Nor do we know whether Willughby and Ray spent the night on the Calf (probably not), for had they done so they would surely have commented on the cacophony of calls created by the adult shearwaters returning to the colony after dark to feed their single chick. They would undoubtedly also have collected a specimen of an adult shearwater – which they seem not to have done. Instead, their account of this species subsequently published in the Ornithology sounds second-hand. That it is Ray who has written the account is clear, for after telling us that Willughby encountered ‘only a young one taken out of the nest’, Ray tells us that he saw what must have been dried adult specimens in ‘the Repository of the Royal Society and in the cabinet of curiosities owned by John Tradescant’. The Royal Society’s ‘repository’ was its museum of biological specimens and scientific instruments, under the care of Robert Hooke and housed at Arundel House beside the Thames on the Strand in London. Tradescant’s collection – so vast it required a 183-page catalogue known as ‘The Ark’ – was one of the wonders of seventeenth-century London and later became the basis of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.5
The account of the shearwaters on the Calf of Man in the Ornithology states that: ‘This islet is full of conies [rabbits], which the Puffins [shearwaters] coming yearly dislodge, and build in their burrows.’ Continuing, Ray tells us that they lay a single egg, ‘although it be the common perswasion [belief] that they lay two at a time, of which one is always addle … The old ones early in the morning, at break of day, leave their nests and young, and the island itself, and spend the whole day in fishing in the sea, never returning or once setting foot on the island before evening twilight: so that all day the island is so quiet and still from all the noise as if there were not a bird about.’6
Ray further informs us that shearwaters ‘feed their young ones wondrous fat’ and that ‘those [people] intrusted by the Lord of the Island [Lord Darby] draw them out of the cony-holes and in order to keep a count of the numbers they take, cut off one foot’ (which, Ray says, gave rise to the fable that they are one-footed). They sell, he says, ‘for nine pence the dozen’ and the ‘Romish [Roman Catholic] Church’ allows them to be eaten in Lent because they taste so like fish. Finally, Ray recounts that ‘Notwithstanding that they are sold so cheap, yet some years there is thirty pounds made of the young Puffins [shearwaters] taken on the Calf of Man: whence may be gathered what number of birds breed there.’ A quick calculation indicates that a total of £30 at nine pence per dozen represents 9,600 shearwater chicks. Presumably this is a minimum, for many nesting burrows must have been inaccessible or undetected. In the late 1700s brown rats arrived on the Calf and the numbers of the eponymous shearwaters collapsed, so that they currently number just a few hundred pairs. The common name Willughby and Ray used for this species accounts for the Manx shearwater’s otherwise puzzling scientific name: Puffinus puffinus.
The illustration of the Manx shearwater that appears on the final plate of the Ornithology is one of the most lifelike images in the entire book. And this is precisely because, in contrast to so many of the others, it was a drawing executed from a live bird. The bird in question was one of two shearwaters kept by Sir Thomas Browne, Willughby and Ray’s ‘learned and worthy friend’ �
� a gentle, intelligent physician with an interest in birds – based in Norwich. Without saying where he got them from, Browne told them, ‘I kept two of them five or six weeks in my house, and they refusing to feed, I caused them to be crammed with fish, till my servant grew weary, and gave them over: and they lived fifteen days without any food.’ The original image of a (very healthy-looking) shearwater, executed in oils on heavy paper, and probably painted by Browne’s daughter Elizabeth, is now in the British Library in London.7 The remarkable thing about this shearwater (and its description in the Ornithology) is that Ray does not connect it either with the nestling Willughby obtained on the Calf of Man, or those dried specimens at the Royal Society that Ray refers to as the ‘puffin of the Isle of Man’. Clear evidence that species identification, be it based on birds of different ages, alive or dead, illustrated or real, could be a considerable challenge.
Willughby and Ray returned to Middleton and Cambridge, respectively, in late July 1660.8 Their journey together inspired and reaffirmed Willughby’s passion for the natural world, for soon after he was home he set off for Oxford where he spent several weeks in the Bodleian Library reading the great works of natural history. From Oxford he wrote to his friend Peter Courthope entreating him to visit, but by this time Courthope had left Cambridge and returned to his family home and was unable to accept Willughby’s invitation. It may have been just as well that Courthope couldn’t go, for it would probably have distracted Willughby from preparing himself for things to come.9
It must have been with great eagerness that Willughby and Ray planned their next journey, this time to Wales and Cornwall. They were to be accompanied by another of Ray’s tutees, Philip Skippon, whom Ray was concerned might not get on with Francis because of their two families’ very different political backgrounds. In fact, Philip and Francis liked each other and the three of them proved excellent travelling companions. And this was the journey that set the course for Willughby’s and Ray’s lives.
Leaving Cambridge on 8 May – Ascension Day – 1662, Ray headed, via St Neots, to Middleton to collect Willughby en route. As in their previous travels they made notes on the state of the towns and villages through which they passed, as well as all aspects of natural history they encountered. At Sutton Coldfield, for example, they reporting finding ‘in great plenty’ moonwort Botrychium lunaria, a rather beautiful fern with distinctive circular leaflets.
Moonwort from Gerarde’s Herball, 1597.
A few days later they visited Norbury Meer, now Nantwich Lake, to see the ‘puits’ or black-headed gulls, where they either witnessed for themselves or were told that the birds lay clutches of three or four eggs and how ‘at the driving every year, they commonly take above a hundred dozen [1,200] young, which they sell at five shillings the dozen’.10
An intriguing illustrated account of the ‘harvest’ is provided by Robert Plot, who visited the ‘pewit poole’ at Norbury a few years later. Slightly younger than Willughby, Plot graduated from Magdalen Hall, Oxford, was elected to the Royal Society in 1677 and served as one of the Society’s two secretaries in 1682, and in the following year became keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Not renowned for either his scientific accuracy or his morals, Plot was held in low esteem by Ray, who wrote (in 1692) to a friend saying that Plot ‘may be too much influenced by worldly advantage of honour and profit’.11 In his Natural History of Staffordshire published in 1686, Plot refers to the ‘learned and indefatigable Mr Willughby and Mr Ray’, only to draw attention to a number of birds he says they failed to identify or had overlooked in the Ornithology.12 It is far from clear, however, that Plot is correct and it may well have been statements such as this that irritated Ray.
Plot described how the islands on which the puits bred at Norbury were prepared by cutting the vegetation to provide nesting places and how the birds returned each year to settle at the pool around Lady Day (the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March), build their nests and lay their eggs. As soon as the chicks had reached sufficient size, but still unable to fly, they were herded into long rabbit nets and placed in pens where they were subsequently fattened on bullock offal or corn and curds. One writer described the birds’ lean flesh as ‘delicious’ with ‘a raw gust of the sea’, which sounds remarkable! Willughby and Ray’s friend, Thomas Browne, felt it rather odd that people should eat young gulls while at the same time refusing to eat ‘other animals whose [natural] food was no more impure’, but the trick was in the artificial feeding that was said to improve their flavour. It was clear, too, that such habitat management, harvesting and artificial feeding had a long history: the Romans did it with thrushes; and Thomas Muffett, author of Health’s Improvement, said that young gulls ‘being fattened … alter their ill nature, and become good’.13
The name ‘puit’ is onomatopoeic and describes the gull’s call; the same can be said for the peewit (or lapwing) – although the sounds made by the two species are quite different.
Robert Plot’s drawing from 1686 of the puit harvest at Norbury Meer.
On arriving at Chester, Ray commented that the cathedral church was remarkable for nothing except a preaching place and that the bishop’s seat in the choir was made of stone.14 Willughby and Ray would return to Chester later in 1669, when John Wilkins was bishop there.
From Chester, Willughby and Ray made their way via Wrexham and Holywell to Denbigh, which they considered ‘one of the greatest towns of North Wales’, reaching Bangor on 19 May 1662, the day Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity. The idea of such an Act – designed to quash the non-conformist churches that had proliferated under Cromwell – was in the air before they left, but, because they were travelling and news moved relatively slowly, it seems unlikely that Ray and Willughby received confirmation until later. Either way, as will become clear, the Act brought about a major change in Ray’s circumstances.
From Beaumaris they took a small boat to Prestholm (Priestholm, known now as Puffin Island in English and Ynys Seiriol in Welsh) on 22 May, noting the plants, including the edible sea-beet Beta maritima, and the birds: ‘two sorts of seagulls, cormorants, puffins, razor-bills, guillems [guillemots], and scrays [terns] of two sorts’.15 The island, which lies off the north-east corner of Anglesey, is tiny, just 0.108 square miles, and its highest point is 60 metres (190 feet) above the sea. The term ‘scray’ comes from the terns’ harsh calls; there are none breeding there now, but the island is still famous for its large colony (currently 700 pairs) of cormorants.
While Willughby’s commonplace book had been ideal for recording his reading and philosophical notes while at Trinity, it was less suitable for recording his natural history observations while travelling. It seems likely, therefore, that he also had other, smaller notebooks for specific topics or particular journeys. Although it is now lost, we know that he had a separate notebook for his visit to Priestholm since he mentions it in his other writings. The notebook referred to could have been Ray’s, but there’s a tiny pointer that virtually confirms it was Willughby’s, since he refers to it as ‘PrestHolme Journy’. The clue is the capital H in the middle of ‘Prestholme’: an uppercase H in the middle of a word was one of the occasional quirks of Willughby’s writing. Sadly, the location of the notebook itself – if it still exists – is unknown.16
Francis Willughby’s writing of ‘Prestholme’ with an upper-case ‘H’.
Some seven miles inland from Anglesey, in the lakes ‘hereabout, viz., at Llanberris [sic], Bettus, Festingiog, there is a fish called torgoch’. It was a name Willughby thought might mean ‘salmon-like’, but to Ray it was a reference to the fish’s red belly. The torgoch was the charr and very similar to one Willughby had seen in Windermere a couple of years previously. Locally, the fish, described as ‘blackish upon the back, red under the belly’, was subject to some ‘fabulous stories’, including one in which ‘three sons of the church brought them from Rome, and put them into three lakes’.17 In fact the fish Willughby and Ray saw in Wales were three of what were once four disti
nct lake populations of charr. In his inimitable style Willughby described the fish, perceptively distinguishing it from similar salmon-like species, and, as a result, many years later it was named Willughby’s charr in his honour.18
Llanberis was also where, on 26 May, they found a species of plant new to science, ‘found on ye back of Snowdon not farre from Llanberis, in ye way from Carnarvan thither near an old tower’. This upland species, which now bears the name Small White Orchid (Pseudorchis albida), occurs widely across Europe, but remains rare (and declining) both in North Wales and elsewhere in Britain. When Ray published his Historia Plantarum in 1686, he recounted how he regretted not having made a full description of the species when he and Willughby first found it.19
On 29 May 1662 Willughby, Ray and Skippon took the somewhat perilous two-mile boat journey from Aberdaron off the tip of the Llŷn peninsula through swirling tidal rips to the beautiful island of Bardsey. Nipped like the waist of a wasp, the island boasts two crescent-shaped beaches, a mountain at one end and a green tail pointing southwards into the Irish Sea at the other. Once there Willughby and Ray saw at first hand why Bardsey was renowned as a holy burial place for saints, for near the ruins of an old church was ‘a heap of dead men’s skulls, and other bones of such votaries, as, for the sanctity of the place, had been buried there’.20 Less macabre, they also saw ‘puffins [Manx shearwaters] and sea-pies’ (oystercatchers) and the beautiful blue spring squill flower ‘growing in great plenty’. Bardsey was also the first island I ever visited, as an eleven-year-old boy; I saw no skulls, saints or their remains, but the seabirds and flowers would shape the rest of my life.