The Wonderful Mr Willughby

by Tim Birkhead

  Before they left England on their travels, Willughby had written from Middleton to Ray in Cambridge, telling him that he was going to design a cabinet for a collection of seeds. The exact date of that letter – now lost – is not known, but we have Ray’s enthusiastic reply. It’s a long quote, but it is important. He writes:

  You mention a Box which you intend for all sorts of fruits and seeds. It must have almost infinite Cells and Divisions to contain all the varieties of Seeds and Fruits. Concerning the Order and Method of it you need not my Advice, for I can give you none but what is very obvious, viz. to put those of the same Tribe near together. As for Instance, to have a Drawer with several Cells or Boxes for Nuts, another for Cones, &c. for the rest of Fruits which may be reduced to several Heads; and then one for Exoticks, which cannot be conveniently referred. In like manner for Herbs, to have a Drawer with several Boxes or Divisions for Legumina, another the like for Cerealia, &c. only those Boxes must be more numerous than those for Fruits. By a Drawer with several Boxes, I mean such a thing as the Printers put their Letters in.36

  The fact that Willughby was collecting seeds, and on a serious scale, belies the fact that when they decided to overhaul the study of natural history, they would divide the work into mutually exclusive zones such that Willughby would look after the animals and Ray the ‘vegetables’. As this and much else makes clear, both men were involved in the study of plants and animals.

  Willughby’s cabinet still exists in the family home. This beautiful piece of walnut furniture consists of fifteen drawers elaborately divided by curved or linear metal strips into numerous compartments – of a different design in each drawer. In total, there are 1,200 compartments, and miraculously, given the passage of time, most of them still contain seeds, and there has been very little spillage. This is very surprising given that the cabinet has been moved between homes on several occasions, including in 1687 when Willughby’s son Francis and daughter Cassandra went to retrieve their father’s belongings long after his death. Twelve of the drawers contain seeds, and when I visited the Middleton family in 2007, Lady Middleton (now deceased) was keen to show them to me. As she pulled open a drawer I was surprised by the seeds’ excellent state of preservation, but somewhat alarmed by the way they jumped around in their low-walled compartments as the drawers were shakily withdrawn and replaced. And, to my shame, I wasn’t really interested, for at that time I had little sense of the significance of what I was being shown.

  I have since wondered whether any of those seeds are still viable. They may well be because, as I learned from Richard Mabey’s Cabaret of Plants, seeds as old as 2,000 years have germinated successfully. The other point Mabey makes is whether seeds lying inert for 350 years, like those in Willughby’s cabinet, if still viable, can be considered ‘alive’.37

  Only when I went back in 2014 to photograph the seeds for a botanical colleague did I see the cabinet in a new light. Lord Middleton, Lady Middleton’s son, met me and kindly agreed to help remove the drawers and place them on the floor so I could photograph them. He suggested that we start at the bottom and work our way up through the fifteen drawers. In fact, at first sight the two lowest drawers looked to be part of another piece of furniture for they lie below a small plinth; they appeared to have been constructed from a paler wood and, in contrast to all but the very top drawer, to have a centrally placed escutcheon. In fact, those two bottom drawers were part of the same piece of furniture; the difference in the colour of the wood was due to the middle twelve drawers being positioned behind two doors and hence protected from the light.

  As Lord Middleton gently pulled open the lowest drawer and I saw what was inside, I gasped in disbelief, for here instead of seeds were birds’ eggs. I was stunned. My mind raced. Could these be eggs that Francis Willughby himself had collected? If so, this would be among the oldest collection of eggs anywhere. Time was pressing: there were all those other drawers to photograph and Lord Middleton, I felt, was slightly bemused by my enthusiasm for what was essentially a tray of very dirty eggshells, many of which were broken.

  We pushed on. I photographed the tray of eggs, we replaced it, and Lord Middleton opened the second drawer. Again, no seeds, but instead a bewildering array of mainly zoological curiosities. Scanning it quickly I noted some mollusc shells, but also fragments of large tropical beetles, some brightly coloured minerals, the dried skin of a skink, a beautiful scorpion and a spider made from wire, and a few detached labels. One compartment that made me blink in disbelief contained a collection of false human eyes. The skink made me wonder. Recognised since ancient times as a potent aphrodisiac, the tail of this particular specimen is missing. Had Willughby, or (given subsequent events) John Ray, been tempted to test its amatory effects?38

  The layer of grime that covered everything seemed exactly right for something that was about 350 years old. Feeling as though I’d stumbled into an Aladdin’s cave, I had a growing sense of the significance of what lay before me.

  Working upwards, the next twelve drawers all contained seeds. I photographed them, noting that in each drawer was a folded sheet of paper comprising a map of that drawer’s compartments and what they contained. The writing was obviously old, but also in several different hands. In one drawer was a vertically elongate, handmade book that was a catalogue of the drawer’s contents. The handwriting here looked old too, but on opening its pages the paper was of a startling whiteness, giving the impression that it might have been made yesterday.

  We came finally to the top drawer. I might easily have overlooked it since, like the lower two drawers, the wood was of a paler colour and appeared – at first sight anyway – not to be part of the cabinet’s structure. It was locked and there was great consternation since no one seemed to know where to find the key. Lady Middleton went to look and although we tried a succession of different keys, we seemed to be out of luck. One by one the staff were summoned, but again no one knew the whereabouts of the key. Finally, someone who looked from his attire to be a gardener arrived and told us unhesitatingly that the key lay in one of the bottom drawers – and so it did.

  This top drawer had no compartments and contained more mollusc shells, a few fossils, a piece of coral, a sea-urchin ‘skeleton’, some almost spherical stones, and fragments of crab exoskeletons. Most significantly, there were slips of paper and written labels on some of the shells that might provide a clue to the collectors.

  The cabinet, so it seemed, was Francis Willughby’s cabinet of curiosities, or part of it at least. Confirmation came when we examined the eggs in more detail. Most of them had been written on in brown ink. Francis Willughby had a distinctive ‘hand’ with certain letters, notably the ‘p’ produced in a particular way. It was a snipe’s egg that clinched it, with the tail of the ‘p’ displaying his wonderful backward and forward sweep of the quill. Here was clear evidence that Willughby had labelled some of these eggs himself.

  During my research career I have had a few Eureka moments, but this was one of the best. I simply could not believe that no one else – apparently – had seen or commented on these eggs or the other drawers of zoological specimens. Neither could I believe that so many of the eggs had survived intact. In fact, their survival was a miracle of neglect. Had they been displayed on cotton wool as is usual, rather than on the wooden base of the drawer, they simply would not have survived. This is because over time acids in the cotton fibres interact with the calcium of the eggshells so that they come to look as though they have been liberally dusted with caster sugar, an effect known as Byne’s disease and one that eventually destroys the eggshells. Not a disease at all, as was once thought, this is a chemical reaction, in which the calcium breaks free from the shell. Had Willughby’s eggs been displayed in this way, the drawer would have contained little more than dusty cotton wool.

  The most miraculous thing of all was that Francis Willughby himself had written on some of the eggs. This provided unequivocal evidence that they were his.

  As we chatted, Lady
Middleton hinted to me that there had once been a second cabinet of eggs. That made sense because the majority of eggs in that lowest drawer were those of small birds, with nothing bigger than a heron’s egg (which is only a little larger than a hen’s egg).

  The labelling on the several heron’s eggs showed that they had been collected on 5 June 1663 when Willughby, Skippon, Ray and Bacon were at Sevenhuis in the Netherlands. The writing on the eggs, however, is not Willughby’s, but it could be Skippon’s, not least because the words on the eggs are identical to those in his journal for that day. I was confused initially because the bird’s names on the eggs were either Ardea cinerea, which is the scientific name, both then and now, of the grey heron, or Ardea cinerea minor, which simply didn’t make sense to me: what was ‘minor’, a smaller grey heron?

  On looking more carefully, one egg has written on it the words ‘Ardea major cinerea Common Herne Reyger Belg’. ‘Herne’ is the old English name and ‘Reyger’ (now ‘Reiger’) the Dutch for grey heron, and Belg means ‘Dutch’. Another egg has the words ‘Ardea cinerea minor Quacke Belgi’, with ‘Quacke’ (now ‘Kwak’) the Dutch for the night heron.

  The night heron would have been new to Willughby since it does not (and probably did not then) breed in Britain.39 Confirmation that ‘Ardea cinerea minor’ refers to this species is clear from the Ornithology, where on plate 49 that name appears alongside an image that is unmistakably a night heron, albeit with the name ‘night-raven’. This is becoming a bit convoluted, but ‘Quacke’ probably refers to the call made by this bird, which is active at night, and of which John Ray writes: ‘It is called night-raven, because in the night time it cries with an uncouth voice, like one that were straining to vomit.’40

  In total the egg drawer has twenty-eight rectangular compartments of different sizes, containing around 133 different eggs. It is impossible to be more precise because many eggs are broken or are mere fragments. Most eggs have been blown rather crudely through a hole at each end. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that collectors started to use an egg-drill, a tool rather like a countersink or pointed burr, which when twirled between the finger and thumb can create a single hole on the side of the egg through which the contents can be removed. Apart from the eggs of two heron species, most of those in the collection are of small songbirds that would have bred in the vicinity of Middleton Hall, including the yellowhammer, chaffinch, house sparrow, starling, bullfinch, the pied, yellow and grey wagtail, wren and blackbird, but also the rook, green woodpecker and wryneck. This last, once widespread in England, is now effectively extinct as a breeding species here.

  At least one mystery remains. Despite Willughby having assembled this collection at Middleton, eggs barely feature in the Ornithology. For many of the species – including the grey heron whose eggs lie in the seed cabinet – there is no description in the text of the Ornithology. Worse, in the account of the night heron, Ray (I presume it is him writing) says ‘this bird lays white eggs’ – which is incorrect and the specimen in the seed cabinet is the typical sky-blue egg of this species.41

  Back to Sevenhuis. Dissection and descriptive anatomy were part of the innovative new science that was the driving force behind Willughby and Ray’s cross-examination of the natural world. What does the inside of this bird look like? What does its internal structure tell us about its relations with other birds? Does the adult spoonbill’s convoluted windpipe – as described by Aldrovandi – develop only as the bird matures? The answer to this last question is yes, as nicely shown by a study conducted in the 1970s.42

  It is clear from the Ornithology that both Willughby and Ray made dozens of dissections, either together or separately. It is also apparent that Ray continued to dissect birds long after Willughby’s death in 1672.43

  At some point – we don’t know when – Ray dissected a male green woodpecker, describing its reproductive anatomy and making an intriguing observation that I believe has neither previously been recorded nor followed up. Ray noticed that ‘The right testicle is round, the left oblong, and bent almost into a circle, which lest anyone should think accidental, I observed in three several [separate] birds.’44 This strongly suggests that the odd-shaped left testicle is a standard feature in this species. Over my career I have dissected hundreds of birds (killed by cars) to examine their reproductive anatomy, but not a male green woodpecker. In many bird species the two testes differ in shape and size, but I have never seen anything as extreme as that which John Ray describes. Intriguing!

  After reporting on the green woodpecker’s organs of generation, Ray switches his and our attention to the tongue, which ‘when stretched out is of a very great length, ending in a sharp, bony substance, rough underneath, wherewith, as with a dart, it strikes insects’. He goes on to say – and this suggests he watched a live bird – that the tongue can dart out three or four inches and ‘draw up again, by the help of two small round cartilages [the hyoid bones], flattened into the fore-mentioned bony tip, and running along the length of the tongue’. Ray goes on to describe how the cartilages ‘from the root of the tongue take a circuit beyond the ears, and being reflected backwards towards the crown of the head … make a large bow’. This – and there’s more of it – is a very careful description of what is an incredibly demanding dissection. Neither Ray nor Willughby was the discoverer of the bizarre arrangement of the woodpecker’s and wryneck’s tongue – Leonardo da Vinci had reported them previously – but this gives a good idea of the level at which Ray and Willughby were operating (literally) and the fact that they needed to see such curiosities for themselves.

  Green woodpecker (or woodspite), from the Ornithology of Francis Willughby (1678), showing the curious arrangement of the tongue.

  No fewer than 155 of the 380 birds described in the Ornithology include an account of their internal anatomy. Willughby’s propensity for dissection is reflected in a letter of May 1672 from Henry Oldenburg to Martin Lister, in which Oldenburg refers to Willughby’s practice of dissecting birds, fishes and quadrupeds – and finding worms in most of them, just as he had with the young cormorant at Sevenhuis.45

  From Leiden, Willughby and company travelled north to Haarlem and Amsterdam, and from there they rode south to Utrecht, spending a few days at each and arriving at Maastricht on the evening of 20 June 1663. In his journal Ray commented on the white storks nesting on the ‘chimnies in the towns and cities as well as villages’. He also mentions the constant chiming of bells, ‘which seldom rest and were to us troublesome with their frequent jangling’. He could not help but notice the extreme cleanliness of the houses (presumably compared with England), with all ‘house-hold stuff marvellously clean, bright and handsomely kept: nay, some are so extraordinarily curious, as to take down the very tiles … and clean them.’46

  In his account of their journey Ray also commented on a difference between the women of England and the Netherlands, quoting from his deceased Trinity College friend, Sir Francis Barnham, who had been there in the early 1600s:

  The common sort of women (not to say all) seem more fond of and delighted with lascivious and obscene talk than either the English or the French. The women are said not much to regard chastity whilst unmarried, but when once married none more chaste and true to their husbands. The women even of the better sort do upon little acquaintance easily admit saluting with a kiss; and it is familiarly used among themselves either in frolicks or upon departures and returns.47

  Not surprisingly, food, especially at inns, was an important topic of ‘research’. The Dutch, they noticed, were almost always eating. The first dish of a meal is usually salad, ‘Sla they call it, of which they eat abundance … The meat they commonly stew, and make hotchpots of it. Puddings … they do not eat; either not knowing the goodness of the dish, or not having the skill to make them.’ Judging from a letter that Ray later wrote to the physician Martin Lister about his diet (and poor health), Ray was inordinately fond of puddings and other rich food – presumably a taste he acquired in Cambrid
ge.48

  The common people, Ray says, consume cod and pickled herrings ‘which they know how to cure or prepare better than we do in England’. The excellent smoked beef ‘they cut into thin slices and eat with bread and butter, laying the slices on the butter’. They have four or five sorts of cheese, including ‘those great round cheeses colour’d red on the outside, commonly in England called Holland-cheeses’. Their beer, ‘thick beer they call it and well they may’, is more than three pence a quart. Finally, ‘all manner of victuals, both meat and drink, are very dear’. Not only that, every transaction with an inn-keeper, as well as with waggoners, porters and boatmen, involved bargaining, not always very successfully since ‘the inn-keepers, in many places, exact according to the rich habit and quality of their guests’.49

  Such was the nature of continental travel for the wealthy.

  5

  Images of Central Europe

  By late July 1663 Willughby’s party had reached Strasbourg in the Alsace. They were there for just three days, but it was here that Francis learned of a local man whose life-long hobby was to have an important impact on his and Ray’s natural-history makeover. Leaving his three colleagues in the city, Willughby went off on his own to meet Leonard Baldner, a dapper little man in his early fifties sporting a reddish handle-bar moustache and chin-puff beard. A prosperous, well-educated member of the city council, Baldner served as the official keeper of forests and Strasbourg’s three rivers: the Rhine, Ill and Breusch, where he was permitted to hunt and fish as he wished.

  Proudly, he told Willughby how he had been born in Strasbourg in 1612, and how he now (after three marriages) had a brood of twelve children. In 1646, he said, when in his thirties, he had shot some beautiful waterfowl he didn’t recognise. After arranging for someone to paint them, he was so struck by the result he decided to describe and illustrate all the birds, fish, quadrupeds and invertebrates that he subsequently killed or captured. The result, as Willughby could see, was a comprehensive, exquisitely illustrated (unpublished) guide to Strasbourg’s aquatic birds and other wildlife.