The Wonderful Mr Willughby
Page 18
Arranging specimens and creating classifications were perfect activities for cold winter nights, but the summer of 1667 saw them out and about again, journeying to the West Country and allowing Willughby to witness what he had missed because of illness in 1662. Unusually for Ray, the 1667 excursion isn’t well documented, but we know that they rode through the counties of Worcester, Gloucester, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, visiting the botanically rich Lizard peninsula, and reaching Land’s End on 17 August. From Ray’s few notes, the trip appears to have been mainly botanical, although it is hard to imagine Willughby passing up the opportunity to seek new birds or to find fish in the Cornish coastal villages. They came back by way of Hampshire, reaching London on 13 September 1667, from where Willughby returned to Middleton and Ray to Notley, where it was his turn to endure a bout of serious illness.38 After he had recovered, and been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 7 November 1667, Ray, or ‘John Wray’ as he signed himself in the Society’s Charter Book, returned to Middleton to continue working with Willughby.
A year after returning from his continental expedition and with no sign of him thinking about marriage, Francis’s family and friends began to apply some gentle but persistent pressure. His daughter Cassandra recounts how, on going through her father’s papers many years after his death, she found several letters from relatives and friends suggesting potential partners. Well off and well connected socially, Willughby was a fine catch and families with eligible daughters were undoubtedly keen to arrange introductions. The first of the letters is one dated 4 October 1666 from a family friend, Thomas Alured, recommending ‘a Sussex lady’, whose identity for us remains unknown. Alured’s next letter suggests Elizabeth, the daughter of a distant relative, Lord Willoughby of Parham, governor of Barbados (recently ‘shipwracked’ and drowned while trying to retake St Kitts in the Caribbean), being ‘fit for his [Francis’s] humour, and [with] proportionable fortune’. The next possibility Alured suggests is Lady Springet’s daughter (possibly the widow of Sir Herbert Springate of Sussex), Barbara, whom he describes as ‘a lady beyond exception, and that both mother and daughter were so in love with his [Francis’s] character that his terms may be fully answered’ – presumably a reference to any marriage settlement.
Alured is nothing if not persistent, and his next suggestion is the eldest daughter of Lady Pile, whose late husband was Sir Francis Pile of Compton Beauchamp, Berkshire. It isn’t clear which of Pile’s three daughters Alured is referring to, but he says she ‘would have ten thousand pounds, besides perquisites to a lady of her quality, and that as much as the modesty and honour of that sex would permit, he was promised a welcome’. Fifth, and final, as far as we know among Alured’s recommendations, was ‘a lady of Lord Fairfax’s family’. Lord Fairfax, otherwise known as ‘Tom the Black’ for his dark eyes and looks, had fought for the Parliamentarians during the Civil War, which, given Willughby’s Royalist sympathies, smacks of desperation on Alured’s part in suggesting this unnamed lady.
It is difficult to know whether Francis was amused, wearied or intrigued by Alured’s parade of possible partners. We do not know whether he dismissed his suggestions out of hand, or whether he did so after being introduced to the ladies in question. But Alured wasn’t the only one urging Willughby to marry. In February 1667, Philip, Lord Wharton, asked John Wilkins to propose one of Wharton’s own daughters as a possible partner. Sir Thomas Wendy was also increasingly keen to see Willughby married. In one letter, clearly somewhat despairing of his brother-in-law’s reluctance to commit himself, Wendy states that he is making ‘one attempt more upon the old, but hitherto unsuccessful errand’ – this time suggesting the daughter of Sir Edward Turner, Speaker of the House of Commons. We do not know the daughter’s name, but in an effusive effort to find Willughby a partner, Sir Thomas described her as someone Francis ‘might be abundantly happy with’, adding as an additional inducement that ‘She has been educated with very great care’. Not only that, she was ‘of a vertuous inclination, sweet disposition, and serious composure of mind’. Moreover, having once been in her company, Sir Thomas judged her to be ‘of acceptable conversation, of a very good stature, about twenty years of age, tho not curious [i.e. not exceptional in appearance] yet cumely’, to which he added that her portion of any marriage settlement would be ‘seven thousand pounds paid down’.39
All to no avail.
Sir Thomas persisted, and his next suggestion was Emma, the younger of Sir Henry Barnard’s two daughters. Francis and Emma were introduced sometime during 1667, but details of their courtship are lacking. They were married in early January 1668 at her home in Bridgnorth, Shropshire: Francis was thirty-two and she was twenty-two or twenty-three. The marriage settlement, the deal to safeguard the wealth of both sides, which was overseen by their respective parents, was painfully protracted and one in which the well-educated Emma took an active part. Francis, too, became increasingly frustrated by the time taken to tie up the deal, which wasn’t resolved until three years after the wedding.
The couple went to live at Middleton Hall where Willughby’s mother, the formidable Lady Cassandra, continued to preside. The marriage seems to have been a great success, with deep affection on both parts. Francis’s sister Katherine, whose own marriage was difficult and who, with her young son, spent much of her time with her mother at Middleton, thanked Emma for the happiness she had brought her brother. Lettice Wendy, Francis’s other sister, wrote to Emma soon after the marriage and before meeting her, to say how pleased she was that her brother had ‘pitched on one soe suteing him’. Katherine and Lettice clearly approved. Lady Cassandra too must have been delighted, and relieved, that her unconventional son had finally started to settle down.40
Willughby and Ray continued to work on their bird material and their friends continued to send them notes and specimens. Emma’s father wrote to Francis in 1668 reporting the capture of an unusual bird that he hoped would end up in Willughby’s hands. ‘It is almost as big as a cuckow, long wings as a Martin, speckled like a Woodcock, a sharp little bill or beak, the eyes standing backwards as big as an Owles, with long hairs on each side of the beak like a Ratt, with some white feathers on each wing. The like hath not been seen here by any of the oldest faulkners [presumably falconers].’ The bird was a nightjar and in Shropshire, where it was captured, the species is still considered rare.41
Willughby and Ray’s friend, Francis Jessop – a student friend from Trinity College and now a wealthy mill owner as well as a mathematician and naturalist, living in Sheffield on the edge of the Derbyshire Peak District – sent Willughby the ‘cases’, or bodies, of various birds.42 The city of Sheffield, then comprising some 5,000 souls, lies up against two very different landmasses on its western border: the Dark Peak comprising millstone grit, and to the south the softer limestone of the White Peak, each with very different bird populations. On one occasion, Jessop sent Willughby several goldcrests – known then as the golden-crowned wren or copped wren – he had captured at his wife’s family home at Highlow Hall near Hathersage some eleven miles from Sheffield. The goldcrest was duly described in the Ornithology, but with no acknowledgement of the similar but rarer firecrest. Interestingly, Conrad Gessner did the opposite in his 1555 book, describing what is clearly the firecrest, but with no mention of the goldcrest, and presuming, as Willughby had done, that there was but a single species in the genus Regulus.43
From the ‘mountains of the Peak of Derbyshire’, Jessop sent specimens of the twite (known then as the mountain linnet), a warbler which he called a ‘pettychaps’, a male and female brambling, ring ouzel, dipper, long-eared owl, and, from an inland body of water near Sheffield, a puffin and a common scoter. The puffin must have been a young bird blown far off its usual marine habitat. The scoter, also a misplaced marine species, preceded the one that Ray was to acquire and describe (as he thought, for the first time) from Chester Market in 1669.
In the autumn of 1668, Jessop obtained the skin of a ‘great bird’ that he
was told was a ‘scarfe’, but believed would ‘prove [to be] a bernicle’, and sent a description of it to Willughby. A ‘scarfe’ was the Lancashire name for a shag or cormorant, or possibly a barnacle goose – a species that also occurs on the Lancashire coast in winter. It is difficult to imagine anyone confusing a cormorant or shag with a goose, so the bird’s identity remains unclear.
Another mysterious specimen that Jessop sent to Willughby was a ‘black legged linnet’. ‘A friend of mine,’ he wrote, ‘kept it in a cage till it dy’d; and so it lay neglected, until I found it by chance dried, as you have it.’ Later, in the Ornithology, Ray wrote: ‘Mr Willughby ascribes to the feet of this bird an obscure dusky or blarkish [blackish?] colour’, which clearly contrasted with the description in Olina’s book, Uccelliera, in which he states that the legs are a ‘middle colour between flesh-colour and white’. Ray – who appears to have had no personal experience of a linnet’s legs – wondered whether there might be differences in the leg colour between male and female linnets, or between birds of different ages, completing his account of the species by saying ‘Mr Jessop sent us a linnet … with feet perfectly black, but that was extraordinary.’44 I suspect Ray was right and that Jessop’s bird was an ordinary linnet whose legs had turned black either with age or after it died.
From the Dark Peak, Jessop obtained two ‘moorgame’ for Willughby and Ray. In his letter accompanying the box of birds he wrote: ‘There is a cock and a hen; the cock is pretty perfect, but the hen hath a wing shot off.’ Uncertain as to what they were, Jessop continued:
The moor-cock is certainly none of the Gallina Corylorum [hazel grouse]; and whether it be the Grygallus [female capercaillie or female blackgrouse] which Gessner describes, I also doubt, having compared these with both his cut [image] and description: it agrees with it in many particulars, but differs from it in some. The feet are not like those of the Urogallus minor [black grouse] but nearer resembling those of the Lagopus [ptarmigan] being feather’d all over.45
Jessop hoped Willughby and Ray could establish the identity of the moorgame, but they were confused too, and on 10 September 1668, Ray, while staying with Jessop in Sheffield, wrote to Martin Lister:
Of birds only four or five species were found by me that I had not seen before, to wit the Grygallus major of Gesner, which the Italians call a Francolin; it is common on heather-clad mountains; sportsmen and countryfolk call it the Red Moorgame. I am well aware that Gesner thinks that the Italians’ Francolin is called the Hazelhen. I think this bird is the same as that whose picture Thomas Crew showed us at Montpellier whose French name I have forgotten.46
This illustrates just how difficult it could be to distinguish similar species and to match written accounts with images or real specimens. Unless sufficiently accurate and detailed, written descriptions can be extraordinarily difficult to interpret, which is undoubtedly why Willughby was so meticulous in his notes. Illustrations, one had to assume, were truthful representations of nature, but as Ray’s written comments on Thomas Crew’s painting referred to above indicate, one couldn’t always take that for granted. Examining specimens, preferably alive or recently dead birds, or dried study skins, is best, but even they show variation between individuals, age classes and the sexes.
The red moorgame is the red grouse, common – as Jessop says – on Sheffield’s Dark Peak. Gessner’s bird ‘common on heather-clad mountains’, presumably in the Alps, must have been the rock ptarmigan (which Willughby had seen in Italian bird markets), and the bird illustrated by Sir Thomas Crew, was, as we have seen, something completely different: a pin-tailed sandgrouse. Remarkable as it may seem for what is now a rather familiar bird, Willughby and Ray’s may have been the first description of the red grouse. They could not then have known that this bird is endemic to Britain and today is considered a distinct form of the willow ptarmigan (which is widespread across the northern hemisphere), but differs from other populations by not turning white in winter.
In the same letter, Jessop described how he had been working hard all day to solve a geometrical problem that Willughby had clearly asked him about. The letter is a mere fragment of what is obviously a longer conversation, so it is unclear just what the issue was, but reading between lines I think it may have been the old chestnut of squaring the circle.47
Willughby and Emma’s first son, Francis, was born on 13 September 1668, eight months after their marriage and ‘above a month before his time’. He apparently had ‘no nails grown’ and was so ‘tender and little’ that he needed very special care during his first few months. It isn’t uncommon for premature babies to have very small, underdeveloped nails on their fingers and toes. Like all parents, Emma and Francis obviously thought the world of their new child – ‘dear Jewel Frank’ – and, as he developed, they also believed him to possess uncommon intelligence. Emma recounted an event that to her, at least, confirmed the child’s extraordinary cognitive abilities. She had given young Francis, then less than a year old, the bodkin (pin) from her hair to play with. Unseen by either his mother or any servant, he pushed it through a crack in the floorboards. A full year later when the bodkin was mentioned, he showed his mother the crack and when the floorboard was lifted, there was the bodkin.
Early in 1668, when there were no insects to investigate, Willughby and Ray busied themselves with investigations of the flow of sap in trees. If we were to judge simply from their results – published in 1669 – we might have assumed that these particular studies began only in the previous year, and in response to a set of ‘Queries concerning vegetation, especially the motion of the juyces of vegetables’, published by the Royal Society in January 1668. But in fact we now know, from hastily written notes in Francis’s commonplace book, that he began these experiments almost three years earlier, in March 1665, and he did so, moreover, on his own, for John Ray was still on the continent at this time.
Willughby’s notes from 1665 provide another insight into the way he approached this study and reported his findings:
Towards ye End of March
Ye principall observations were,
1.That in ye night (or in ye day when there was very cold blasts) scarce any liquor came.
2.They allwaies dropped Fastest in ye morning ye Sap being then most greedily sucked up.
3.Ye greatest Bowes and those that were nearest ye roots afforded most.
4.They continued dropping at ye same wounds neare a Fortnight.
5.When they begun to give over a thick white substance like Fleame stuck to ye Flannels and settled at ye Bottomes of ye Bottles. This white settlement is doubtlesse ye matter of ye white wood. Q[uaere]: Whither ye settling of ye sap bee not allwaies of ye colour of ye wood.
6.It tasted very pleasantly allmost like water and sugar, but when ye weather grew Hot, it quickly turned and grew soure.
7.Some of this was boiled with sugar &c. as Mr Evelin Directs.48
To paraphrase: by making cuts in birch trees he found that the flow of sap was least during the night (or if the day was cold); at other times the flow was greatest in the morning and especially vigorous from large branches and those nearest the roots. The sap continued to flow from cuts for almost two weeks. As the flow dried up, a phlegm-like substance appeared, which he assumed was part of the ‘wood’. Willughby says that ‘it’ tasted like sugar water, but it isn’t clear whether he is referring to ordinary sap or the phlegm-like sap just mentioned. I suspect he’s referring to ordinary sap since he then says he boiled some, as ‘Mr Evelin [John Evelyn]’ suggested. Boiling the sap collected from trees in spring has been practised by native peoples for a long time and is how maple syrup is made.
The other significant aspect of Willughby’s notes is the inclusion of three queries that Francis asked himself: whether sap was always the same colour a
s the wood; whether sap comes only from the bark; and ‘whether ye sap descend and circular [presumably meaning “circulate”] or evaporate by perspiration’.
William Harvey’s discovery in 1628 of the circulation of the blood – ingeniously demonstrated using tourniquets and simultaneously establishing the existence of valves in veins to prevent any backflow – raised the question of whether a similar circulation occurred in plants. Previously, it had been assumed that plants had no ‘sensitive soul’, an idea promoted by Aristotle and Theophrastus in the fourth century bc. However, the fact that the sensitive plant Mimosa pudica from tropical America, recently discovered in Willughby’s day, has leaflets that droop dramatically on being touched and reopen minutes later, suggested that it was far from insensitive. In fact, this plant, whose extraordinary and rapid movements continue to fascinate us, was the starting point for studies of plant physiology.
Understanding how Mimosa’s leaf movements occurred was one of the first tasks allotted to the newly formed Royal Society by Charles II. In response, the Society established a committee in 1665 to create a list of botanical questions for its members. Robert Hooke made the study of Mimosa his own, but the Society’s list – eventually published in January 1668 – also included queries relating to the rising of sap in trees: ‘In tapping, cutting or boring of any tree, whether the juyce, that vents at it, comes from above or below … What side of the tree affords most sap?’; ‘whether the sap comes more copiously at one time of the day or night, than another?’49
Willughby embraced the study of sap with the same enthusiasm and ingenuity as he did his other research. The questions and the methods that he – and later Ray – employed might seem naive to us now, but these were some of the first investigations into what we now call plant physiology. The original questions, and Willughby’s report with Ray in 1669, prompted others, including their relentlessly inquisitive and academically ambitious friend Martin Lister, to undertake more research on the same topic.50 Curiously perhaps, the analogy with human blood-flow resulted in the conclusion that sap circulated rather than flowed directionally through the vessels of plants. This erroneous view persisted until 1727 when Stephen Hales – whose love of botany was inspired by Ray’s writings – disproved it. The remarkable way in which trees, including 300-foot redwoods, Douglas fir and the mountain ash (a kind of eucalyptus) transport sap from their roots to the uppermost branches against gravity with no obvious pump, was finally revealed in the twentieth century. The mechanism, known as ‘cohesion tension’, is based on there being a continuous column of water between root and leaf and the surface tension caused by evaporation from the leaf surface pulling the sap upwards through the entire height of the plant.51