The Wonderful Mr Willughby

by Tim Birkhead

  The years at Middleton after their continental journey saw Willughby maturing as a scientist and creating a niche as a natural historian within the Royal Society. Those years saw him also as a family man, with his daughter, Cassandra, born on 23 April 1670, and a second son, Thomas, on 9 April 1672. Soon after Cassandra’s birth, Lettice Wendy wrote to congratulate Emma, noting, somewhat disapprovingly, that her brother was away again, but finished by saying, ‘well, you know what he’s like’.52

  Increasingly, Willughby sent his observations, many of them made with Ray, to Henry Oldenburg, the Royal Society’s correspondence secretary. The result was that most were duly published in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions.

  One of Charles II’s achievements soon after gaining the throne was to establish the General Post Office in 1660, whose rapidly evolving postal service became a boon to those Royal Society members, such as Willughby, who lived too far from the capital to attend its weekly meetings. Although letters had been important for scholars for well over a century, Francis could now write a letter reporting his findings to Oldenburg, knowing that it would be read to those members present at the Society’s next meeting, and then receive feedback, usually by return of post.

  Creating a letter in the 1660s involved a kind of literary origami, which, since the invention of the envelope, is a skill long since lost. Taking a single sheet of paper orientated in what we would call the ‘landscape’ position, Francis – and many others, it seems – folded it vertically down the middle. He then wrote on both the first and second sides, as one would normally write on these now ‘portrait’-orientated half-pages. After completing the second page he turned the paper through 90 degrees to continue writing – typically – half a page, at right angles to the first two pages. He then folded the paper inwards on each side to create three equal-sized blank panels. Turning the folded paper over, in the middle of the panel he (or sometimes someone else) wrote: ‘For Mr Henry Oldenburg secretary to the Royal Society at his house in the Pal Mal, London’. Often as an afterthought, Francis continued to add information on the other two panels. Finally, the letter was turned over and the two flaps were sealed with a blob of wax, such that the letter formed its own envelope.

  Opening Francis’s letters today, they look – there’s no polite way of putting this – a bit of a mess, an impression not helped by his hasty scrawl using every bit of available space. But this was Francis’s way of doing things, and it reflects his energy and eagerness to get things done. Even his formal letters appear to be rapidly written.

  One of Francis Willughby’s letters to the Royal Society on the ‘bleeding of trees’ (the flow of sap), dated 12 March 1669.

  Francis’s letters would have been handed to a boy who walked to the post house or receiving station (usually an inn) at Tamworth six miles away. From there a man on a horse would carry Willughby’s letter, along with any others, down the post road – the Chester Road (now the A5) – in eight- to sixteen-mile stages, changing horses each time, towards London some eighty miles distant. The Royal Society, in turn, had someone who visited the London receiving station each day to collect the incoming post and deliver the outgoing letters.

  Reading through Willughby’s letters of discovery in the Royal Society library, I have a strong sense of a man finding his footing and warming to the task of reporting his findings. The free exchange of information and the informality with which he and Oldenburg corresponded is endearing. Such familiarity occurs occasionally today when author and journal editor know each other, but in the main, the process is rigidly objective, automated and utterly impersonal. Oldenburg, however, deliberately and skilfully developed relationships with his correspondents, encouraging, cajoling and orchestrating their efforts for the sake of science. Deeply committed to the Society and his position within it, Oldenburg worked his socks off, writing 250 to 300 letters each year, commenting once to Robert Boyle: ‘I am sure, no man imagines what store of papers and writtings passe to and from me in a week.’ Oldenburg, whose personal circumstances are little known, was the glue that held the Royal Society together during its first decade, dexterously constructing a vast web of practitioners with the explicit aim of fulfilling the Society’s objective to scrutinise the whole of nature.53

  On 19 March 1670, Oldenburg wrote to Francis Willughby to tell him of a letter he had received from Israel Tonge, another Fellow, that included two noteworthy bits of information: an account of the circulation of sap in trees, and a duel between a spider and a toad.

  Intrigued, Willughby replied:

  I shall impatiently desire very particular directions for the duell between the spider and the toad, and a good description of the spider [presumably, if he was to identify it]: I will use all possible diligence in any necessary apparatus, it being a thing so strangely improbable, that I shall scarcely believe my owne eyes.

  Oldenburg must have asked Tonge for further information because on 16 June, Tonge sent a more detailed if somewhat incoherent account. It is immediately apparent that he had not witnessed the duel himself, but in an effort to acquire more information, and to his credit, he had visited the site – the garden of the White Lyon alehouse at Marden, near Maidstone in Kent – where the duel was said to have taken place. After asking around, he located the sole surviving witness, Elias Rolfe, who told him that the incident occurred in ‘ye time of ye late warre’, presumably the Civil War, which ended in 1651 – so about twenty years previously, and when Elias was ten or eleven years old.

  He and several others of the household:

  … heard a strange squeaking noise, and going forth to fetych some billets from ye woodpile hee perceived, yt ye noise, they had heard in the brewhouse, was made by a toad in a fight with a spider. The manner of their fight was like yt of 2 fighting cocks, sometimes approaching sometimes retreating. The manner by wch ye toad did labor to defend himselfe, was by spitting wch he cast from him a foot or 2, and ye spider avoided it by leaping up on high, so sometimes she would leap above a foot right up from ye ground. This skirmish continued for ye space of an hour & more, till at last ye spider got upon the toad & killed him.

  Elias added: ‘The spider was a large one of ye bignesse of a child’s fingers end and white bag’d, had a white dun list down her sad coloured back.’54

  Remarkably, Tonge found other people in the same village who had apparently witnessed separate spider-toad incidents. One described how the spider jumped onto the back of the toad and ‘fastens her teeth into his neck in ye place where his head is joined to his body’ and that the spider let go when the toad squeaked.

  Finally, Tonge asked Oldenburg: ‘But herein I must request Mr Willoughby’s information of whom I long since was informed, that he is curious in such observations.’ Willughby certainly was curious about such things, but unfortunately there’s no record of him expressing an opinion.55

  My feeling is that the spider-toad contest was a folk tale, elaborated and multiplied by time and false memory. That three such toad-spider duels had occurred in the same area seems unlikely, especially since none of the several spider experts I consulted had ever heard of spiders attacking toads.56

  As Francis Willughby is best known for his contributions to natural history, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that he also wrote a book on games. It certainly was an eye-opener when his manuscript was found among the papers in the Middleton Collection during the 1970s. Prior to this discovery, no one ever imagined that Willughby’s intellectual pursuits ranged so widely. Neither John Ray nor William Derham mention his interest in games, presumably because it had little bearing on natural history. Indeed, it is probably precisely because of this lack of interest that Willughby’s study of games survived, lying untouched and unread for over 300 years among the family papers.

  Mary Welch, archivist for several decades at Nottingham University Library, was the first to handle the Middleton Collection, and it was she who, in adding the material to the university catalogue, sometime in the 1950s or
1960s first referred to the volume as the Book of Games. Her description of it is as ‘a large folio, parchment-bound volume containing notes which he [Willughby] compiled on card games (“nodde cribbage”, “ruffe and trump”), ball games (football, stool-ball), other games requiring special equipment (shuttle-cock, “scotch hopper”, bowls, and “ten pegs or 9 pegs”, shovel board, and so on), and simple children’s games’.57

  Although Welch christened it the Book of Games, Willughby himself would probably have called it a book of ‘plaies’ rather than games. For Welch the manuscript was one of several, and while of considerable interest, she attached no particular importance to it, assuming merely that Willughby had taken part in some of the sports he describes.

  It wasn’t until Dorothy Johnston, Welch’s successor, looked at it again in the early 1990s that the manuscript’s true significance emerged. Dorothy discussed the manuscript with her partner, David Cram, a linguist, and he realised that it was very different from anything else previously written on games, and much more than just a list of sports or ‘plaies’. Not only that, the manuscript is one of only a handful of documents in which we can hear Willughby’s voice directly.

  Prior to the mid-1600s, all accounts of games had been written by gamesters for gamesters. Willughby’s interest was completely different. While cribbage, football and scotch-hopper might seem somewhat remote from bitterns, burbots and bees, we perhaps shouldn’t be too surprised that Willughby’s interests were so broad. Francis Bacon’s philosophy, which served as a beacon for members of the Royal Society, encouraged ‘histories of all kinds’ – that is, first-hand investigations of any topics that could contribute to a better understanding of natural and man-made phenomena.

  Willughby’s interest in ‘plaies’ was probably piqued during his travels in 1662 with Ray and Skippon as they watched local people participating in various games and sports.58 It is unlikely that Willughby immediately planned a systematic study of games, but with his intellectual curiosity aroused he started to document what he saw on this and subsequent travels.

  There is a somewhat cryptic reference to Willughby’s interest in this topic by his daughter Cassandra, who in her memoir wrote: ‘There are in the library at Wollaton many manuscripts which were written by my father … one which shews the chances of most games.’ This is probably not the Book of Games, but a companion volume referred to by Willughby himself as a Book of Dice, now sadly lost, but almost certainly dealing with the likelihood of rolling certain numbers with one or more dice. Willughby’s fascination with chance, which mathematicians now call ‘probability’, was probably encouraged by the fact that great mathematicians such as Christiaan Huygens and Gottfried Leibniz had pointed out the value of studying games in relation to the ‘doctrine of chances’.59

  For Francis, ‘games’ or ‘plaies’ covered several different topics, from those with cards or dice, to ball games such as tennis, rural games, cockfighting, ‘bare [sic] baiting’, courtly word games and vulgar word games, some of which were called ‘Selling of Bargains’. Willughby notes that ‘All bargaines are either obscene or nastie: A bids B repeat Oxe Ball so manie times in a breath. B repeating fast saies, Ballox.’60 In discussing cock fighting, Willughby repeats the advice that to produce the best fighting birds, fighting cocks need to be reared under ravens – possibly easier then than now, but still something of a logistical challenge!

  Seventeenth-century dice of the kind Francis Willughby would have seen and might have played with.

  The Book of Games also includes those played by children, and, curiously, several pages of it are in a child’s hand, edited and corrected by Willughby himself. It would be nice to think that this was the hand of Willughby’s son Francis, but he was only four when his father died so this seems unlikely. Another member of the family may have written it. However, Willughby did observe and record his son Francis’s games, noting the toys and objects he first played with. Reading this volume, I was reminded of the fact that two centuries later Charles Darwin did much the same, observing the behaviour of his own children and documenting the way their facial expressions and emotions developed over time.

  Another intriguing aspect of Willughby’s study of games was his description of motion – including the spin on rebounding tennis balls. It was an area that lent itself to mathematical analysis, which as we have seen was one of Francis’s areas of expertise, and in 1669 he attempted to re-ignite a debate about the theory of motion, sending sophisticated analyses to Henry Oldenburg, but failing to enter the fray with the Royal Society’s other mathematicians. It was a closed shop and Francis wasn’t part of the tight circle of mathematical protagonists. He lived too far away to attend all the Royal Society meetings; moreover, depending as he did on published versions of the debate, he was perpetually out of date.

  Previously, however, at his second meeting at the Royal Society in 8 November 1662, Francis had demonstrated his mathematical ability by presenting the solution to a long-standing geometric problem: the optimal pattern of planting fruit trees to ensure that they all received maximum light. The puzzle was probably similar to what is known today as ‘circle packing’: deciding how to fit the maximum number of equal-sized circles into a square of a particular size. The Royal Society later reported that ‘Mr Willughby produced his demonstration to prove that the same area of ground planted with trees after a quincundiall figure will hold more trees placed at the same distance from one another, than the Square, in the proportion of 8 to 7.’61 ‘Quincundiall’ here means ‘quincuncial’ and refers to the quincunx pattern, like the five pips on that particular side of a dice. I wonder whether Francis was inspired to tackle this problem by Thomas Browne’s 1658 book The Garden of Cyrus – a bizarre and difficult volume that may possibly have made more sense to Willughby than it does to most modern readers. Some have even wondered whether Browne composed it while in a state of ‘altered consciousness’, due to its copious examples of God’s quincundial geometry: lattices, the figure ‘X’, the number five – all presented as evidence of His wisdom.62

  Using almost identical methods to those he employed with birds, fish and insects, Willughby constructed a hierarchical classification of games using bifurcating and trifurcating arrangements, as is apparent from the figure below.63

  Willughby’s classification of games compared with John Wilkins’s classification (upper section).

  At one level then, the Book of Games was an intellectual exercise that allowed Willughby to utilise and develop his interest and knowledge of mathematics, chance and motion. It also reinforces our view of a man hungry for data, with an eager appetite for the intellectual stimulation provided by original research and a tremendous enthusiasm for classification. The new science generated novel ways of looking at the world, and creating what we can think of as taxonomies of knowledge – of natural history, games or words – at the very heart of it. As many researchers will recognise, the mental exercise of classifying games almost certainly generated insights and ideas that proved useful in Willughby’s classification of birds, fish and insects, and vice versa too.

  Meanwhile, he and Ray continued to work through their ornithological notes, planning and preparing for the volume they anticipated producing. Had he known how little time he had left, Willughby would have undoubtedly been more focused on this particular enterprise.

  8

  Curious about Birds, Illness and Death

  We have another brief flicker of pure light that helps to illuminate how Willughby’s mind worked. This time it is in just two pages of the Ornithology that John Ray blandly entitled ‘Some particulars which Mr Willughby propounded to himself to enquire out, observe and experiment in birds’. Ray included this list of questions posed by Willughby as he pulled everything together to produce the book. For me, these two pages are as exciting as the recent discovery that DNA can be extracted from the eggshells of New Zealand’s extinct giant flightless moas.1 I was surprised to find only one previous ornithologist who had noticed Willu
ghby’s questions and shared my enthusiastic opinion of them: William Jardine. In his 1843 memorial of Willughby, Nectarinidae or Sun-Birds, with a Portrait and Memoir of Francis Willughby, he wrote that these questions ‘If founded on fact and drawn up with judgment, would not fail to contribute to the advancement of ornithology.’ As well as doing this, they provide a rare opportunity to hear Willughby’s voice.2

  To be fair, the way Willughby phrases those questions isn’t always straightforward – they were, in all likelihood, just jottings – and a superficial glance at them suggests that they might be cursory and of little consequence. But they really are, as Jardine said, an opportunity for enlightenment.

  The puzzle is why Ray included them at all in the Ornithology. He introduces Willughby’s questions in such an understated way and answers some of them with such weary indifference that I wonder why he bothered. But thank goodness he did. Lists of queries were beginning to be part of the way that scientists at the Royal Society tackled particular problems – as we saw with their botanical questions – and it is likely that Willughby created his list with exactly the same process in mind. It is evident also from his notes on sap in the commonplace book, from his Book of Games and from his legal papers, that asking himself questions was simply part of his modus operandi.