The Wonderful Mr Willughby

by Tim Birkhead

  Willughby’s list of what was wrong with Spain is a long one. The country, he writes, is:

  in many places … very thin of people, and almost desolate. The causes are: (i) a bad religion; (ii) the tyrannical inquisition; (iii) the multitude of whores; (iv) the barrenness of the soil; and (v) the wretched laziness of the people … very like the Welsh and Irish … For fornication and impurity they are the worst of all nations, at least in Europe; almost all the inns … having whores who dress the meat, and do all the business. They are to be hir’d at a very cheap rate. It were a shame to mention their impudence, lewdness and immodest behaviours and practices.

  The contrast with what had gone before in France and Italy could hardly have been greater. Willughby was weary, lonely and unstimulated. Reaching Seville on 16 October 1664, he tried hard to secure a passport for Portugal, which he hoped to reach via a trip to Tangiers and from there by boat to Lisbon – the best way into Portugal he said – but a combination of factors, including his ‘mule’s ill fortune’ (presumably lameness) scuppered this particular plan.

  Two letters awaited his arrival in Seville. One was from John Wilkins, who wrote to persuade him to travel – at the Royal Society’s expense – to Tenerife to make astronomical observations of the transit of Mercury across the sun, from the 12,000-foot summit of Pico del Tiede. The second letter informed Willughby that his father was seriously ill.

  Had Willughby made the trip to Tenerife he might have discovered some new birds, including the distinctive and beautiful blue chaffinch and two species of pigeon (Bolle’s and Laurel pigeon), all of which occur only on that island.

  Abandoning the idea of visiting Tenerife, Willughby hastened – albeit on his despised mules – for home via Toledo, Madrid and Burgos, arriving on Spain’s northern shore at Irun on 14 November 1664. It is here that Willughby’s account, published by John Ray, ends – almost. A letter from Willughby to Ray places Willughby in Paris by 15 December. Briefly describing his route from the Spanish border – Bayonne, Bordeaux, Poictiers (Poitiers), Amboise, Blois and Orleans – Willughby writes with no punctuation, and presumably in an even greater rush than usual:

  [I]‌ got hither [Paris] a fortnight since this journey of almost a thousand miles [1,600 kilometres] I came all alone having agreed with my merchant [presumably someone he had met en route] … and I thank God [e]scaped very well along but at Vittoria [Vitoria-Gasteiz] and San Sebastian … was basely troubled with searchers [security men, presumably corrupt].55

  It must have been with a sense of both relief and achievement – after a year and a half away – that Francis arrived back at Middleton just before Christmas 1664 to find his father still alive.

  7

  Back at Middleton

  Willughby’s father, Sir Francis Willoughby, it seems, was a man of sweet temperament and great virtue, and it was he who had saved the family from financial ruin in the early 1600s. As his granddaughter Cassandra later said: ‘He, by his seasonable vigour and understanding, retrieved, repared [sic] and restored the not only shattered, but almost ruined estate of the family.’1 It was he, of course, who paid for his son’s education and travels and accepted Francis’s decision to lead a life of study.

  However, when Sir Francis died the following year, in December 1665,2 Francis had no option but to take over the running of the estate, which he did alongside his studies. He had a strict routine, working at his research in the morning between getting up and eleven o’clock when his mother oversaw family prayers. After this he walked: ‘which for the most part was all the time he spared from his studies in the whol [sic] day, for as soon as he had dined he would again return to his books’, that is, ‘unless company came to viset [sic] him who he thought himself obliged to entertain’.3 I was struck by the similarity with Darwin’s rigorous, somewhat antisocial daily routine in which work was broken by a restorative, contemplative walk, a regime only possible among academic men of independent means.

  While in London, during May 1665, risking the plague that was beginning to become prevalent once again, Francis had received a letter from his father urging him to ‘match himself’, that is, to find a wife. After his father died, Francis’s brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Wendy, continued to encourage him, saying: ‘now that he was become the head of the house he hoped that he would lose no time, but settle himself and bear a share in publick imployment’.4

  Looking after the estate was one thing, marrying was another. As his daughter later wrote, Willughby deferred marriage ‘lest his being engaged to a family should prevent his pursuing those studies which he was then so very intent upon’.5

  His studies at this time included constructing classifications of both birds and insects, an important impetus for which was this request from his colleague John Wilkins: ‘I must desire your best Assistance for the regular Enumeration and defining of the Families of Plants and Animals … I [do not] know any Person in this Nation who is so well able to assist in such Matters as your self, especially if we could procure Mr Ray’s Company to join in it.’6

  Francis and Wilkins had first met in Oxford in 1660 when Wilkins was Master of Wadham College and Willughby was reading in the Bodleian Library. Then, during his brief tenure as Master of Trinity, Wilkins had also met John Ray and knew that between them, Willughby and Ray possessed the knowledge and skill to help him pull off his ambitious plan to create a universal language of science. The three of them had discussed it when they first met, and, indeed, it was Wilkins’s grand scheme that set Willughby and Ray on their course of classifying and ‘ordering’ the natural world. It was also Wilkins who encouraged them to collect and classify words in different languages during their travels.

  By 1666 Wilkins’s plan was beginning to take shape and he needed some expert scientific input on the business of classification. His idea was to use tables demonstrating the natural order and relationships between things to create a universal language of science, facilitated by the use of ‘real characters’ or symbols similar in principle to the notations used in music or mathematics.

  Some of Wilkins’s ‘real characters’ from his Essay towards a Real Character (1668).

  The ambiguity and confusion over the names of things, whether they were fowl, fish or flowers, was very real. Since a primary aim of the new science was to encourage clarity by avoiding ambiguity, it isn’t surprising that Willughby and Ray were happy – initially, at least – to support Wilkins’s project.

  Soon after receiving Wilkins’s request in October 1666, Willughby started in earnest to prepare his classificatory tables of insects, fish and birds. The insect classification tables that he subsequently sent to Wilkins were constructed from work already completed before the continental journey, for Willughby and Ray began making observations on insects while still at Cambridge; and by 1661, Willughby had a sufficient grasp of the topic to send Wilkins a remarkable, albeit brief, overview of insect biology. The account was never published and the original lost, but a copy in Henry Oldenburg’s hand survives among the Royal Society’s Classified Papers. It was read at the Royal Society on 20 November 1661 and provides a general account of insect life cycles, including development and metamorphosis; egg design; egg-laying behaviour; and the puzzling fact that some insect larvae often gave rise to other organisms. As an overview, it seems very basic by today’s standards, but in an area where knowledge was so limited, Willughby’s insect adventures broke new ground. His findings were exciting and within a decade others were eagerly following his entomological lead.

  Willughby and Ray’s fascination with insects had started in August 1658 when they reared ten large white butterfly caterpillars in a box. After feasting for several days on the turnip and cabbage leaves provided, the caterpillars attached themselves to the sides of the box in preparation for pupation. Soon after, seven of the caterpillars ‘revealed themselves to be viviparous’, literally, giving birth to live young, or ‘vermiparous’, giving birth to worms, ‘for out of their backs and sides there burst out very ma
ny little creatures of the class of maggots’. Between thirty and sixty maggots emerged from each caterpillar, after which the caterpillar expired. Immediately after their birth, the maggots ‘were opening a weavers shop’ – meaning that they were weaving for themselves silk caskets or dwellings alongside the caterpillar’s corpse. Some six weeks later, in October, a little fly emerged from each silken cocoon. Of the caterpillars that did not produce maggots, their pupae created cabbage white butterflies the following April.7

  What on earth was going on? Why should a species sometimes give rise to its own kind, but at other times produce a completely different type of animal? Willughby and Ray were mystified, but intrigued. They were also careful not to jump to any conclusions. Instead, they posed the testable hypothesis that the large healthy caterpillars gave rise to butterflies, but the weaker and thinner ones, for which ‘nature was unable to achieve her original intention’, had to resort to producing ‘a less perfect little creature, namely a fly’.8

  In the mid-1600s it was widely believed that one species could transform itself into another, and that life was sometimes created spontaneously, with maggots emerging from corpses, fleas from dust and flies from filth or fermenting fruit. We have Aristotle and his followers, such as Pliny the Elder and Marcus Terentius Varro, to thank for these two specious notions, both of which proved difficult to dislodge. Aristotle, for example, suggested that redstarts turn into robins in the winter. This is not quite such a silly idea as it seems when you know the circumstances. Redstarts were (and still are) summer visitors; robins, however, were generally only winter visitors to coastal Greece where Aristotle once lived. As redstarts disappeared, robins seemed to replace them. Aristotle’s deduction about the cause of this change in the local avifauna was shown to be wrong by William Turner in 1544 when he reassessed Aristotle and Pliny’s (largely plagiarised) ornithological observations. This transformation could not be true, he said, because in Cambridge he had seen both species side by side.

  Turner was a forerunner of the new science and one of Willughby and Ray’s most important ornithological predecessors. It wasn’t only animals that were thought to transform themselves; as Ray points out in his catalogue of Cambridge plants, it was once believed that turnips could grow from cabbage seed. He then adds: ‘In fact we have learned that a fairly close relationship exists between these two plants from the viviparous caterpillars that arise on cabbages, which feed off the leaves of turnip no less greedily than off those of their own cabbage, although they disliked most other leaves that we have given them as food.’9

  Aristotle promoted the idea that animals, especially invertebrates, could be spontaneously spawned from dirt. Oysters emerging from the seabed were his prime example and it was also a convenient explanation for European eels – whose reproduction remained a mystery until the late 1800s. Spontaneous generation was finally laid to rest by some clever experiments conducted by Louis Pasteur in the nineteenth century.10

  John Ray, however, was among the first to nail his colours to the mast and declare spontaneous generation implausible: ‘All insects are the natural issue of parents of the same species with themselves.’11 He wrote to tell the Royal Society this some thirteen years after his and Willughby’s initial observations, and it seems impossible that they did not discuss spontaneous generation as they watched those maggots burst out of the cabbage white caterpillars. In his letter Ray acknowledged that it was the ingenious experiments by the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi, published in 1668, that finally convinced him. Tantalisingly, Ray also wrote: ‘I hope shortly to be able to give you an account of the generation of some of those insects, which have been thought to be spontaneous’ – presumably, the tiny flies and wasps that he and Willughby watched emerging from caterpillars.

  It was actually Willughby who wrote to the Royal Society in 1671 relating how he has observed ‘anomalous production’ in a ‘great many sorts of caterpillars’. He also says that he agrees with his friend Martin Lister’s view that these maggots are the offspring of ichneumon flies. Willughby then adds that ichneumons (by which he means parasitoids in general) exhibit a wide variety of lifestyles: ‘Some breed, as bees do, laying an egg, which produces a maggot, which they feed till it comes to its full growth; others, as we guess, thrust their eggs into plants, the bodies of living caterpillars, maggots &c’.12

  Willughby was clearly close to confirming the parasitoid explanation and demolishing the notion of spontaneous generation, but the ingenious and ruthlessly competitive Lister beat him to it. Lister’s priority, however, is technical only, since he had no more evidence than Willughby that parasitoids laid their eggs in other insects. Indeed, it is clear that Willughby, more cautious and much less competitive, was still seeking experimental confirmation when he says that while he subscribes to Lister’s view he ‘cannot yet demonstrate it’.13

  A year or two younger than Willughby, Martin Lister had graduated from St John’s, Cambridge, trained as a physician in Montpellier, and returned to England to practise in York. Brilliant, with a wide range of interests, including natural history, Lister had written to the Royal Society earlier in 1671 saying that on dissecting some large flies he had found two bags of ‘live white worms of a long and round shape with black heads’, and wondering whether these were the offspring of ichneumons.14 He also thought that ichneumons fed on spiders’ eggs: an error on which Willughby corrected him, pointing out that Lister had mistaken the silken cocoons spun by ichneumon larvae for the silk-enclosed clusters of spider eggs.15

  When Ray came to write Willughby’s history of insects many years later, he made a more definitive statement: ‘I think the ichneumon wasps prick these caterpillars with the hollow tube of their ovipositor and insert their eggs into their bodies.’16 Others had reached a similar conclusion, including two Dutch biologists, Jan Swammerdam, who also studied the parasitoids of white butterfly caterpillars in the 1670s, and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek – pioneer microscopist and discoverer of spermatozoa – who described the parasitoids of aphids. However, contrary to Willughby’s earlier comment that silkworm larvae never exhibited anomalous generation, the life cycle of their parasitoids (tachinid flies) had been known to the Chinese silk-producers since the eleventh century.17

  The existence of parasitoids could have spelled difficulties for the deeply religious Ray: why would an all-wise and benevolent God create something as beautiful as a white butterfly only to have it destroyed so diabolically by a parasitoid? Intriguingly, this does not seem to have occurred to Ray, and it was only in the nineteenth century that the issue of ‘non-morality’ of nature emerged. Although Ray recognised that animals such as dogs could feel pain, I suspect that when it came to insects Ray’s views – consciously or unconsciously – were similar to those of Darwin’s Catholic arch-critic St George Mivart, that they were incapable of feeling pain. For Darwin, the existence of parasitoids reinforced the efficacy of natural selection over design by a deity:

  I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.18

  The studies of parasitoids were only one part of Willughby and Ray’s entomological endeavours. At a meeting of the Royal Society on 5 May 1670, the physician John King19 ‘produced some willow wood, containing worms wrapt up in leaves, and lodged in several channels made by themselves’, which he had received from Sir John Barnard from Northampton. There being three pieces of wood, ‘one was delivered to Mr Hooke for the [Royal Society’s] repository, the other to Mr Willughby, and the third was kept by Mr King to observe what insect it would produce’.20

  King describes the leaf-wrapped packages as being like ‘cartrages of powder, wherewith pistols are wont to be charged’, each about one inch long, composed of twelve, fourteen o
r sixteen pieces of leaf, and ‘put one after another into a bore made in the wood, fit for their reception’.21

  Seriously intrigued by the specimen he received, Willughby then travelled with John Ray to Astrop some twenty miles southwest of Northampton in August 1670 to see some of the ‘cartrages’ for themselves. The newly discovered spa at Astrop also allowed Willughby to take the waters there in the hope of curing his recurrent fevers. A Mr Snell showed them some of the ‘cartrages’ and Ray identified the outer covering as rose leaves, recalling ‘that this very spring a worthy friend of his, Mr Francis Jessop brought him a rose leaf out of which himself saw a bee bite such a piece, and fly away with it in her mouth’.22