The Wonderful Mr Willughby

by Tim Birkhead

  Announcing that he thinks he has revealed the ‘whole mystery’ of the bees, Willughby began his letter to the Royal Society with a description of how the ‘cartrages’ are orientated along the grain of the wood; that they contain pap or batter ‘of the consistence of a jelly, or sometimes thicker; of a middle colour between syrup of violets and the conserve of red roses; of an avid taste, and unpleasant smell’; and that there is one bee larva per ‘cartrage’. We now know that the malodorous pap or batter is a semi-liquid mix of pollen and nectar on which the developing larva feeds as it grows.

  Several bees emerged from the original piece of wood sent to Willughby, and he describes them as being shorter and thicker than honey bees, ‘but the surest mark to distinguish them is that the forcipes [jaws] or teeth of them are bigger, broader and stronger’. He also included a simple drawing – but not of the bee itself – to complement his letter.

  Francis Willughby’s sketches relating to his leaf-cutter bees. II a rose leaf with segments removed by the bees; III a ‘cartrage’; IV an individual rose-leaf piece unwrapped. The original caption reads: ‘II represents the leaf, out of which a long piece, as III, and a round piece, as IV, were bitten. V shews the cartrage itself, and VI the theca [pupal case].

  Almost a year later, in July 1671, Willughby reported again to the Royal Society, that the ‘cartrages’ he had collected in 1670 were hatching and ‘do now almost every day afford me a bee’. He adds excitedly that he could hear the bees ‘gnawing out their way before I see them’. The arrangement in which the young ones, adequately provisioned, develop into adults, ‘designed to lay all winter’ before emerging the next summer, Willughby calls an admirable ‘contrivance of God and Nature’.23

  The bees that King, Ray and Willughby observed are solitary, leaf-cutter bees, and Willughby’s is the first description of their life cycle. The species was subsequently named Willughby’s leaf-cutter bee, with the scientific name Megachile willughbiella.

  John Wilkins’s book, An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, was published in 1668. Included within its hundreds of pages were classifications of plants by Ray, and of birds and fish – of which more later – provided by Willughby and Ray. It also included Willughy’s classification of insects ingeniously structured around ‘generation’ (reproduction and development), with the two major divisions being those insects whose offspring hatched from eggs as miniature adults, and those that went through a succession of different life stages – caterpillar, pupa, chrysalis – before finally emerging as a winged adult.

  There had been two notable previous attempts at insect classification, one by Aldrovandi in 1602, who arranged insects according to whether they were aquatic or terrestrial, with further subdivisions based on morphological characters such as the presence or absence of wings and legs. If the idea of a legless insect seems odd, remember that in the 1600s ‘insects’ included worms and molluscs.

  The other classification was by Thomas Muffet, also known as Moffett or Moufet, but it was not published until 1634, long after his death. Muffet had been a student at Trinity College in Cambridge in 1569, going on to train as a physician in Basel. Travelling during the 1580s, he studied the anatomy of silkworms in Italy and returned to settle in London in 1584 where he and Thomas Penny, whom he had met as an undergraduate, began working together on a book of insects.24 In the 1590s, Muffet produced a book on nutrition entitled Health’s Improvement, published posthumously in 1655, containing a list of 100 English birds classified according to their culinary and nutritional properties but also their own diet. Written at a time when the ornithological literature was extremely limited, Muffet’s information has been considered by some to be important, but others dismissed it as being derived from Gessner and William Turner.25

  Muffet’s The Theatre of Insects, also posthumously published, had a history that in some ways anticipated Ray’s writing up of Willughby’s insect observations. It appears that Penny started the book, obtaining some of his material from Gessner, whom he had met in 1565. After Penny died in 1588, Muffet inherited the project, continuing to add information and completing it in 1597, but he too died – in 1604 – before publishing the material. The book then passed through several other hands and was eventually published by a London-based Huguenot physician, Theodore de Mayerne, in 1634. Although appearing under Muffet’s name, the title page of The Theatre of Insects is explicit in stating that it is the work of several authors.26 The classification in it is based on the presence or absence of wings, habitat (aquatic versus terrestrial) and the number of feet, but whether it was constructed by Penny, Muffet or someone else, we may never know.

  Muffet is best remembered today not for his work on insects, birds or nutrition, but for his stepdaughter Patience, who was scared away by a spider while eating her curds and whey.27

  Both Aldrovandi and Muffet classified insects based on what the animal looked like at any particular point in time. Willughby’s innovation was to use metamorphosis – how the animal changed over its lifetime – in his classification. It was a stroke of genius.

  The reality of embracing Wilkins’s project for a universal language of science, however, came as something of a shock to Willughby and Ray, for the rules within which Wilkins wanted them to work were restrictive – to put it politely. Wilkins was ‘fascinated by the harmonies of nature and the mystic sense of the significance of numbers’ and imagined the arrangement of animals and plants falling neatly into pre-existing groups of nine.28 Despite this unrealistic, not to say ludicrous constraint, both Willughby for birds, fish and insects, and Ray for plants, managed to comply with Wilkins’s wishes better than one might have imagined. And despite Wilkins’s gushing acknowledgements in the preface to his Essay towards a Real Character, they weren’t happy, as Ray disclosed in a letter to Martin Lister:

  It remains for me to reveal to you and pour into your bosom something that has severely stung me. I am ashamed and tired of those botanical tables, in the composing of which the bishop of Chester [as Wilkins now was] revealed that he had employed my efforts.

  He continues:

  In arranging them [the tables in Wilkins] I was compelled to follow not where nature led, but to adapt the plants to the prescribed method of the author … What possible hope is there that this method would be perfect rather than utterly deficient and absurd?29

  Willughby almost certainly felt the same. And while Ray’s letter to Lister implies that it was all a dreadful waste of time, the exercise probably wasn’t entirely without benefit, for just as an author profits from successive drafts of a manuscript, Wilkins’s enforced exercise in classification undoubtedly helped Willughby think hard about how he and Ray should classify birds and other organisms.

  Spurred on by the success of his Essay, which Robert Hooke enthusiastically endorsed, saying that he wished that all scientific information could be communicated in this fashion, Wilkins began work in 1669 on a Latin edition of his book, presumably to attract a continental audience. He asked Willughby and Ray to now provide some new, revised tables, and it may have been in connection with this that, in April of that year, they went to stay at the episcopal palace on the river at Chester, where Wilkins was now the bishop – a position gifted to him by the king in 1668 as a reward for his Essay. It was at Chester that Ray acquired an unfamiliar duck, a common scoter, from the market and managed to purchase a porpoise from some local fishermen, which he and Willughby dissected. Ray’s account of the porpoise dissection, published in the Royal Society’s journal in 1671, described the animal’s external morphology and internal anatomy in an extraordinarily clear and concise way. Indeed, his account is a model of how such scientific investigations should be reported. However, even though Ray recognised that many aspects of the porpoise’s internal features were more similar to those of quadrupeds than fish, he persisted in referring to it as a ‘fish’.30

  The other event at Chester was a bout of debilitating illness that laid Francis low for a while. It was
a foretaste of what was to come.

  With more loyalty than commonsense perhaps, both Ray and Willughby produced revised tables – in Latin – for the new edition of Wilkins’s Essay. Willughby’s tables were evidently a substantial improvement on the original ones, for later, after Willughby’s death, John Ray told John Aubrey that this particular classification of insects was the best there was. Sadly, the Latin edition never saw the light of day for Wilkins died – of ‘a suppression of urine’ – in November 1672, and, much more significantly for the history of science, Willughby’s classificatory tables were lost too.31

  Despite some initial enthusiasm, John Wilkins’s attempt to produce a universal language of science was not a success – for several reasons. The notation and symbols he proposed were as alien as Chinese characters are to an Englishman, and few, if any, had the patience or inclination to master them. Wilkins’s fixation on the number nine was also difficult to defend. But most importantly, his ingenious scheme failed because – as other philosophers were quick to point out – it was logically flawed. As an ardent cleric, he assumed the story of the Bible to be true; that Adam had once possessed all knowledge, including that pertaining to natural history and classification. Wilkins similarly assumed that Noah had also enjoyed that same knowledge – how else would he have been able to ensure a pair of every species in the ark?

  Wilkins’s image of Noah’s Ark (from his Essay towards a Real Character, 1668) – with a complete absence of birds, fish and insects.

  Wilkins’s view was that Adam had somehow lost that knowledge, which like original sin, was innate and built into us, and that it was his task to recover it. If he’d known the term, he’d have said it was imprinted in our DNA. The philosopher John Locke on the other hand reckoned we were all born as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, and that knowledge is not innate, and hence is not recoverable, a view that anticipated the nature-nurture debate.32

  Curiously, Wilkins’s numerically constrained arrangement of the natural world foretold and indeed may have inspired a similar system in the early 1800s by the entomologist William Sharp Macleay, but one based on fives rather than nines. Macleay’s system was rooted in the notion that everything in the natural world could be represented by interlocking circles – an idea that harked back to Pythagoras – and that there were five orders of birds, subdivided into five tribes each comprising five families. The most enthusiastic ornithological proponent of what became known as the ‘quinary system’ was William Swainson during the 1830s. Like Wilkins’s arrangement based on the number nine, this too was nonsense, but for a while at least it was a roaring success, unlike Wilkins’s system. The ornithologist Alfred Newton later wrote:

  The success it [the quinary system of classification] gained was doubtless due in some degree to the difficulty which most men had in comprehending it, for it was enwrapped in alluring mystery, but more to the confidence with which it was announced as being the long-looked-for key to the wonders of creation, since its promoters did not hesitate to term it the discovery of ‘the Natural System’…33

  I should add that the enthusiastic acceptance of the quinary system by so many nineteenth-century ornithologists was also a measure of the desperation with which the true ‘arrangement’ (classification) of birds was sought.34 Alfred Newton’s words sparked a sense of déjà vu for me, as I thought about the subsequent announcements of the discovery of the ‘true’ arrangement of birds, and the way that molecular revelations are also – for many birdwatchers and ornithologists – enwrapped in alluring mystery. We always assume that what we know at any point in time is the truth, forgetting that as has been shown over and over again, in many instances it is usually only the ‘truth for now’. This is the way science proceeds.35

  In the words of one historian, the task Wilkins set himself with his project for a universal language of science was as ambitious and monumental as nuclear fusion: splitting the atom. The end result, however, was more like the 1980s notion of ‘cold fusion’, a nuclear process that promised clean, cheap energy, but turned out to be a very damp squib.

  Wilkins’s project wasn’t a complete waste of time. The work he inspired Willughby and Ray to undertake resulted in classifications of birds, fish and insects that were to stand the test of time and form the basis of those used by all subsequent generations of biologists.

  Across the fields and several miles from Middleton Hall lies a small copse. Francis Willughby and John Ray are following a young farmhand towards the wood, and once inside he stops beneath a giant oak and points up to the topmost branches to show them the large, flat twiggy nest he has found. All three men step back into the shade of the understorey, but with a clear line of sight to the nest. Francis holds the gun expectantly. All eyes are on the nest. They wait. After twenty minutes, in a sudden sweep of stalling wings a huge bird appears through the canopy and the gun goes off with a crack and a cloud of blue smoke. The bird falls noisily through the leafy branches and onto the ground. It staggers into an upright position and looks around in a bewildered kind of way. Willughby, Ray and the farmhand set off towards their prey, but the bird sees them and on flapping wings, but unable to take flight, runs as rapidly as a chicken through the undergrowth. Faster, the farmhand overtakes the bird, and kills it by twisting its neck. Urging him not to be too vigorous, Francis takes the limp body from him, excited by his new acquisition.

  They walk back to the tree that holds the nest. The farmhand swings himself up into the lower branches and then climbs carefully upwards. He peers over the rim of the nest and announces loudly that there are two chicks. Somewhat warily in case they peck or claw at him, he grabs each in turn and throws them down onto the ground where Willughby kills them. There’s no emotion in this. It is functional: the acquisition of specimens. While John Ray may once have waxed lyrical about the beauty of wildflower meadows as the root of his botanical inspiration, there’s neither lyricism nor sentiment here. Willughby is pragmatic. There is no ornithology without specimens: it is as simple as that. We might recoil in revulsion at such an attitude, but for Willughby and Ray killing a bird was little different from us today identifying one through binoculars. Understanding the beginnings of ornithology requires us to recognise this, putting aside our emotions, and for the time being at least, accepting that the quest for knowledge was emotionally neutral, at least in terms of specimens.

  Middleton Hall and immediate surroundings in 1762. The house, with its moat (centre), was probably much as it was in Francis Willughby’s day, but the avenues of trees and formal gardens were probably planted by Francis’s son, Sir Thomas Willoughby, in the early 1700s

  Back at Middleton Hall, Francis lays out the three birds, the adult and the two chicks, on the deal table in his workroom. As though he is holding a baby directly in front of him, he picks up the adult bird in both hands and smooths its feathers before placing it on a pan balance to record its weight: thirty-one ounces. Ray takes note. Willughby then measures the length of the bird from the point of its bill to the tip of the tail (twenty-three inches); the span of its wings (fifty-two inches); and from the tip of the bill to the corner of its mouth (one inch and a half). The nostrils, he notes, are ‘long and bending [curved]’, and the irises a ‘lovely bright yellow or saffron colour’.

  After describing the plumage, including its ash-coloured head and mouse-dun back, he lays the bird on its back and lifting each wing in turn counts the primary and secondary feathers together – which he calls the flags – twenty-four on each side. The tail, he notes, consists of twelve feathers. Moving now to the legs he tells Ray that they are ‘feathered down somewhat below the knee’ (more usually known as the ‘ankle’, technically this is the joint between the tibiotarsus and tarsometatarsus). The legs and feet are ‘short, strong, yellow … The talons long, strong, sharp and black.’

  Ray writes it all down. Francis then picks up a small sharp knife, and parting the feathers on the bird’s belly, exposes the bare skin and plunges the blade just below the sternum. He sli
ces downwards, and then, using the fingers of both hands, pulls the sides apart to expose the guts and gently separates their coils from the connective tissue, commenting to Ray that the gut seems shorter than in the common buzzard they had examined recently. Sliding his fingers down the length of the slippery intestine, Francis reaches the bulging stomach. Holding it between his finger and thumb, he slices it open using the lance, only to find it stuffed with vivid green caterpillars, some of which he can identify. So distracted is he by this entomological bonus that he forgets to record the bird’s sex.

  Turning to the young birds, Francis barely bothers to describe their appearance – immature birds are of limited use in identification – other than noting that they are covered in white down, spotted with black; their feet are a pale yellow and their bill is white. Inside the stomach of the first one he finds the remains of several frogs, and in the other, he shows Ray in amazement, are ‘two lizards, entire, with their heads lying towards the birds mouth, as if they sought to creep out’.

  Francis washes his bloody hands, and takes stock. Turning to the notes he made previously when describing a common buzzard, he starts to list the differences between the two species. This one, known locally as a honey-buzzard, has: (i) a longer tail; (ii) an ash-coloured head; (iii) the irises of the eyes are yellow; (iv) thicker and shorter feet; (v) dark barring on the wings and tail, which are about three inches broad. ‘Have we seen this bird before?’ he asks Ray.36

  Willughby enjoyed several years of pre-marital freedom during which time he continued to work on his ornithology and other projects. In June 1667, Ray wrote to Martin Lister telling him how he and Willughby had spent the previous winter arranging Willughby’s collections of birds, fishes, ‘shells, stones and other fossils, dried plants and coines’.37