The Wonderful Mr Willughby

by Tim Birkhead

  Amid those sad but beautiful painted corpses sits a single live bird: a little owl whose angry yellow eyes stare defiantly at the viewer. Why a live owl? The answer is that this was an essential part of the Italian bird-catcher’s paraphernalia – as Willughby and Ray saw for themselves. Small birds, especially, would mob the owl – which was tied to a post – drawn either to within shooting range, or becoming ensnared on the horribly adhesive lime sticks that the bird-catchers placed around the owl.

  The birds in the painting have been carefully set out; no poulterer’s shop ever looked this neat. There’s no blood; the birds’ plumages are perfect, and instead of lying in a sorry amorphous heap – as I once saw them in a bar in rural Spain – the birds are tidily separated from each other, allowing us to celebrate their beauty and to identify them. In fact, the painting isn’t by Caravaggio at all, but just who it was that created this sanitised image of an Italian bird market stall remains a mystery.27

  Cabinets of curiosities continued to draw Willughby and his colleagues: not knowing what wonders they might encounter, they couldn’t resist. Visiting the house of a man known only as ‘Rosachio’,28 ‘a reputed astrologer, who was a mountebank [charlatan] that sold medicaments in the piazza of St. Marks’, they went to see his collection of rarities ‘which were kept in pretty good order’ with his ‘lesser things [small objects] in boxes divided into small partitions, with a wire grate over them’ to prevent their loss. Items included the dried tail of a beast that Skippon thought might be a shark, and which Rosachio told them had wings when it was alive. A basilisk perhaps? He also had the head of a ‘bachurlars, a bird taken in May about Modena, with much kindness for a man’. The ‘bachurlars’ or baciurla in local dialect, literally means ‘simpleton’ or ‘fool’, a term used for several bird species that show ‘much kindness for’ or no fear of man. In this instance, it may refer to the tawny owl, which in daylight can seem unafraid of people. ‘Taken in May’ could imply a fledgling owl, which often seems almost indifferent to people.29

  Rosachio had a small menagerie with a marmotto (alpine marmot), which ‘sleeps all winter’, taken in the Alps; five sorts of parrots in cages, kept warm by a fire; and ‘a fine paraquit with a red bill, a very long tail and a black spot and ring about the neck’, presumably a ring-necked parakeet.

  Another dubious character they encountered was a Flemish-born ‘chymist’ named Regio, whose trade was secrets (that is, processes), and who said that he had once lived in England with the Duke of Buckingham. For a mere £25 Regio offered to sell Willughby four such secrets: (i) extracting of mercury from lead; (ii) extracting of sulphur from mercury; (iii) fixing sulphur to withstand very high temperatures – although, as Skippon recorded, he ‘confessed he wasn’t able to fix it completely’; and (iv) making gold volatile. ‘Mr Willughby proffered him the much lower price of ten cecchini [zecchini] for these four secrets which he refused to discover [reveal] them for.’30

  This wasn’t the only kind of dubious practice they encountered. The fascination with cabinets and the obsession with finding new specimens meant that travellers were vulnerable to being duped. As early as the mid-1500s, Conrad Gessner warned of ‘apothecaries and others who usually dry rays and shape their skeletons into varied and wonderful forms for the ignorant’.31 Gessner was referring to people such as Leone Tartaglini of Foiano, who in the 1560s and 1570s had a cabinet and a shop in Venice from which he sold all sorts of questionable rarities. These dishonest practices continued and, when Count Lodovico Moscardo produced the catalogue for his Verona museum in 1672, he warned against the ‘swindlers and charlatans from Dalmatia’ who sold examples of the basilisk in his museum.32

  Basilisk created from a dried ray, illustrated originally by Gessner, copied by Aldrovandi and later, as shown here, by Jan Jonston (1657).

  Willughby may have been a victim of such a fraudster, for in one of the trays of zoology objects in his seed cabinet I came across the most extraordinary specimen. When I opened that drawer in 2014 for the first time, of all the objects lying there this was the specimen that caught my eye. Despite being a zoologist for almost fifty years I had never seen anything quite like it. The specimen in question is a four-centimetre-long black beetle whose head, thorax and abdomen are covered in hooks and spines – reminiscent of the kind of monster that one would find crawling about in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The beetle is mounted on a long pin, and looks as though it has just been removed from a display case. I picked it up, and using the pin turned the animal over to look at it properly. It didn’t make sense, but was sufficiently convincing that I was unable to write it off as bogus. I showed an image of it to a few entomologists, one of whom realised that its head and thorax were actually the jaws of a fish. He was more specific: they were the pharyngeal jaws of a moray eel. Wow! That was an impressive bit of zoological detective work. I went back to look at the specimen for a second time, and matched up the fish jaws with its backward-pointing curved teeth, but also examined the abdominal spines, some of which were broken, allowing me to see that they were the thorns from a plant – probably hawthorn.

  This sophisticated forgery, an exemplar of the mountebank’s profession, encapsulates the problem Willughby and Ray faced as they endeavoured to replace fabrications and falsehoods with the truth.

  Was Willughby duped or did he buy that counterfeit insect for its sheer ingenuity and novelty value, or as an object lesson – effectively saying: ‘Look, this is what we are up against?’ It is hard enough trying to identify and classify genuine organisms, without the contribution of animal forgers. The fact that this Piltdown beetle is not mentioned in the History of Insects suggests that neither Willughby nor Ray was deceived.

  Willughby and his friends left Venice in early December 1664 to spend just over one month in Padua. The university here, founded in the thirteenth century, was one of the great intellectual centres of Europe. They signed up for a series of lectures delivered by Pietro Marchetti, a supremely skilled anatomist and surgeon who had studied under Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente – better known simply as Fabricius. Fascinated by reproduction, and despite being rather hopelessly loyal to Aristotle’s antiquated knowledge, Fabricius conducted pioneering research, including reporting that chickens could store sperm for a full year from one breeding season to another. Fabricius in turn had been taught by Gabriele Fallopio, most famous now for identifying the fallopian tubes (later named in his honour), but his many other discoveries included the third earbone, now known as the ‘stirrup’ or stapes, and the clitoris. Fabricius revolutionised the teaching of anatomy at Padua by the introduction of a public dissecting theatre – as Willughby and Ray would soon see.33

  For all his fame, Fabricius, it seems, was a pretty maudlin kind of person, moaning about his salary and the hassle of teaching students – not unlike some of my academic colleagues. His most famous pupil was the English physician William Harvey, who, like many others, spent time in Padua completing his education. Harvey arrived in 1599 and graduated with a doctorate of medicine in April 1602, at the age of twenty-four.

  From 1609, Harvey was in charge of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, and from 1618 was ‘physician extraordinary’ to James I (and later Charles I). Like his Paduan predecessors, Fabricius and Fallopio, Harvey was interested in ‘generation’ – reproduction and embryo development. The challenge he set himself was to understand the crucial process of what we now refer to as fertilisation, but in his case, the role of semen in the generation of new life. Recognising how difficult that would be using quadrupeds or humans in this research, he focused his attention on birds whose external embryo development arrangement – otherwise known as the egg – was, he thought, more tractable.

  Harvey conducted experiments with broody hens that he kept in his house, disproving Fabricius’s notion that they could store sperm and produce fertile eggs for as long as a year after separation from a cockerel. Hens, like all female birds, can store sperm, but as Harvey demonstrated, only for a maximum o
f thirty days. Only? It is still pretty remarkable and utterly different from what happens in humans and indeed most mammals. Harvey was super-smart and when he discovered errors in his supervisor Fabricius’s work, he said so. In many ways, he was the archetypal academic: an astute, rigorous and clear thinker; he knew the literature and understood what needed to be done to solve the mystery of fertilisation. What he didn’t know was that he would need a microscope to do so. The hand-lens he relied on simply wasn’t sufficient to allow him to see the minute male and female gametes, and he failed to make the breakthrough he was hoping for. Frustrated and disappointed, his notes on generation lay unpublished – and unknown – for many years until his friend George Ent took them and arranged for their publication in 1651. That book, On the Generation of Animals, was to serve as an invaluable source of information about reproduction when Willughby and Ray started writing their Ornithology.

  Harvey wasn’t interested only in bird and mammal reproduction, for he also studied insect generation, but his notes were lost when in 1642 his Whitehall lodgings were ransacked by Parliamentary soldiers during the Civil War. Had his notes survived and been included – as they surely would have been – in his Generation book, they would have influenced and inspired Francis Willughby and helped John Ray when he finally started to pull together all of Willughby’s entomological results.

  Pietro Marchetti, whose lectures Willughby and Ray attended, was Italy’s most celebrated surgeon. His expertise spanned neurosurgery, anal fistulas and gunshot wounds. He was probably kept busy with the latter at least, for Padua was a dangerous place as Ray noted: ‘The citizens and strangers here dare not stir abroad in the dark, for fear of the scholars and others, who walk up and down the streets most part of the night, armed with pistols and carbines.’34

  Ray and Willughby attended a dissection of a woman under Marchetti’s instruction in the surgeon’s home. This came about because at the time of their visit Francis’s relative, Charles Willoughby, was studying in Padua to become a physician. It was he who told Ray and Willughby about this particular anatomical event and arranged for them to attend. There are few details of what must have been an edifying experience, other than the fact that it occurred over ten days in mid-December, when the cooler temperatures helped to keep cadavers ‘fresh’. Even more enlightening, on Christmas Day 1663, Willoughby and Ray were invited to observe a Caesarean operation performed by Marchetti’s son, Antonio. When I first read of this I hoped for the sake of both the mother and the spectators that the procedure was successful. But Ray’s notes explain that the mother was already dead, and that the extracted infant lived only a few days. It was once thought that Julius Caesar had been born this way, hence the name of the procedure, but it appears not to be true. However, full-term foetuses whose mother had died were sometimes saved by being cut from the womb – although not in the case witnessed by Willughby and Ray. Only in the nineteenth century were Caesarean sections (as they became known) used routinely to save the lives of both mothers and infants.

  More dissections followed after Christmas, including a capercaillie and a female hare whose stomach contents Ray at first thought smelled of honey, but on reflection he realised it might have occurred because the animal had consumed material from a fir tree. The details of these anatomical adventures don’t appear in Ray’s published account of their travels, possibly because they might have been considered inappropriate. Instead, the notes were found among Ray’s papers after his death by Samuel Dale, who in 1706 published them in the Royal Society’s Transactions.35

  It was while in Padua that Willughby purchased a collection of dried plants – a herbarium – from the famous physic garden there. The plants were pressed and dried, attached to sheets of paper, labelled and bound between covers like a book. Just as with the bird and fish paintings that Willughby already owned, the herbarium provided an invaluable source of reference material. In truth, however, the herbarium was more equivalent to a physical collection of insects and the dried skins of fish, reptiles and birds, with the added advantage that the botanical specimens survived the ravages of time rather better than zoological material. When Willughby and his friends visited Padua’s wonderfully geometric physic garden – which still exists – it was already over a century old with a splendid reputation for the roughly 2,000 plant species it contained. It was probably because of the garden’s reputation that both resident and visiting physicians were keen to possess their own Paduan herbarium – a desire encouraged no doubt by the gardeners happy to supplement their income. Willughby had seen a Paduan herbarium previously when he and his colleagues were in Altdorf and he presumably realised that acquiring one for himself was a possibility. However, the herbarium that Willughby purchased in Padua, and which is now part of the Middleton Collection, is puzzlingly limited in both the number of specimens – just sixty-nine – and their taxonomic diversity: they are mainly plants of the daisy and cabbage families.36

  The botanical garden at Padua was the first in the world, and this is what it would have looked like when Willughby and Ray visited it.

  In early January they returned to Venice for a further twenty-six nights, after which on 1 February 1664 the four companions finally said farewell to that city and travelled westwards towards Vincenza. After arriving there on 3 February and taking note of its extensive silkworm industry and its ‘rich and gustful’ wines, they travelled the ten kilometres to the famous cave of Costozza where they visited an enormous roost of hibernating bats. In the same cave ‘in some standing waters they also encountered a curious animal’ that John Ray describes as ‘a kind of fish or rather insect [that is, invertebrate] which they call Squillae Venetianae, i.e. Venice shrimps, but they are that sort which naturalists call Pulices marini or aquatici, i.e. sea-fleas or water-fleas’. Ray is referring here to an eyeless, two to three centimetre-long shrimp-like creature with the name of Niphargus costozzae.37 In Ray’s day the local name squilla meant ‘shrimp’, creating the potential for confusion with the mantis shrimp Squilla mantis, common on the muddy bottom of the Venetian lagoon and considered a delicacy, but strictly marine. There’s a fine dual – dorsal and ventral – portrait of Squilla mantis among the Venetian ‘fish’ images purchased by Willughby, but no image of Niphargus costozzae.

  Making their way on to Verona they visited Lake Garda, which Ray tells us ‘furnishes the city with plenty of excellent fish’ including an unusual species ‘of the trout kind, called Carpione, peculiar to this lake. Those we saw were not a foot long, of the fashion of a trout.’38 This species, known as Salmo carpio, is related to the salmon and is rather like the charr that Willughby had seen previously in the Lake District and in Wales, and endemic to certain lakes. The carpione is unique to Lake Garda, but only just since its numbers have declined catastrophically since the time of Willughby’s visit. Wondering perhaps whether Lake Como was home to other endemic fish, Francis left his three colleagues near Milan and went north alone to see for himself. When they all met up again in Milan, Willughby told them that the lake at Como ‘affords a great store of fish, viz. 1. Bottatrice; 2. Agone, which are catch’d best in the darkest nights; 3. Pisce piso which hath a thorn or prickle on every scale’,39 but presumably, no carpione.

  Because fish like the carpione and charr have evolved independently in different lakes, they were, and continue to be, a nightmare to classify: are those from each lake a separate species, or should they all be lumped together? The debate continues. Of the three Lake Como fish mentioned by Willughby: the agone is the twaite shad; the bottarice is the burbot Lota lota, an unusual bottom-living species and the only freshwater cousin of the cod, and now extinct in Britain. Its name refers to the single sensory barble that dangles beneath its chin. Like its marine relative, the burbot is excellent eating. The Pisce piso is probably what is known now as the pigo Rutilus pigus, a roach-like fish in Lake Como that in the breeding season develops a covering of impressive thorns or spines on its scales, and unlike Willughby’s beetle, is a genuine beast
.

  As an undergraduate Willughby had written about Ulisse Aldrovandi’s museum in his commonplace book and no doubt fantasised about seeing it for himself. Considered the father of natural history, Aldrovandi studied mathematics and medicine at Bologna, where he later created the botanic garden. In 1549 he was locked up for heresy – for denying the Trinity – and kept under house arrest until the following year. It was during his incarceration that he turned to natural history. The eventual result was a vast museum of curiosities and a set of impressively large volumes describing much of the world’s biota, as it was then known.

  So it was that in mid-February 1664 Francis Willughby and his three friends were taken to the Palazzo Pubblico in Bologna and shown around Aldrovandi’s collection by the curator, Professor Ovidius Montalbanus.40 With some 7,000 plants and 18,000 other specimens in six rooms, they must have been overwhelmed. Philip Skippon noted some of what was on display, including: malformed fruit (how did that occur?); a puppy without a head that died soon after birth (really?); a ‘notable signature of a spider’s web’; a dragon or snake with wings and legs; the antlers of an ‘old stag that had done branching, and began to degenerate into rough extuberances’; a picture of a hairy girl born of two hairy parents; a hen’s egg shaped like a gourd, and so on. It wasn’t entirely Aldrovandi’s handiwork, since, after his death, the collection had been purchased in the 1650s by the rather sad-faced nobleman Fernandino Cospi, who merged it with his own and then presented it all to the state in 1660.