by Tim Birkhead
If pleurisy is what killed him, it comprised an inflammation of the membrane around the lungs causing chest pains and breathing difficulties: symptoms of what in all probability was pneumonia. Francis may also have been suffering from what was known then as ‘tertian fever’, ague or malaria, contracted either in the marshes of Lincolnshire or during his travels in Italy, and accounting for the alternating bouts of shivering and fever. Add to this a constitutional fragility and all the physical and mental stresses associated with the inheritance, and it is little wonder his body gave up.
Francis’s funeral took place at Middleton parish church a few days after his death, with the family’s curate and friend George Antrobus preaching the final sermon. At the graveside with the family were Francis’s dear friends, John Ray, Philip Skippon and Francis Jessop.
9
Into the Light: Publication
Francis Willughby’s death caused not only despair among his family, friends and Royal Society colleagues, it unleashed decades of difficulties for them all. Following the funeral, Willughby’s father-in-law, Henry Barnard, took control. On discovering that there was a mere £160 of ready cash left in the coffers, his immediate task was to borrow monies – including some from Francis’s mother, Lady Cassandra – to keep the household afloat. John Ray, together with Francis’s friends, Philip Skippon and Francis Jessop, and Willughby’s brother-in-law, Thomas Wendy, were executors, but Barnard felt that none of them – and Ray in particular – fulfilled their duties.
For his part, Barnard assumed that the £60 Willughby had granted Ray as an annuity meant Ray would remain as part of the household, educating Willughby’s sons Francis and Thomas, and – almost incidentally as far as he was concerned – bringing Francis’s notes to a form in which they could be published. By the time Francis died, he and Ray had already spent seven years working on their ornithological materials, but they were by no means ready for publication. Ray’s annuity was fairly modest; sufficient perhaps if he was to be housed and fed in the Willughby home, but quite inadequate if he was to live independently, when a sum of around £200 per annum would have been more reasonable.
In Barnard’s eyes, Ray needed to earn his annuity by taking an active role in running the estate, especially since the family knew that he and Francis had spent a considerable amount of time studying the legal records of the Willoughbys’ property and lands. Even less realistically, Barnard felt that Ray should also help to pursue the ongoing inheritance issue with Beaumont Dixie.
Initially at least, Ray had the support of Lady Cassandra, enabling him to continue to focus on what he considered his main responsibility – preparing the Ornithology. His relationship with Emma, however, was more problematic. Although she agreed to cover the cost of engraving the plates for the Ornithology, she did so on the assumption that its publication would yield a profit – which was not unreasonable, given the dire state of the family’s finances. Her feelings towards Ray, Jessop and Skippon, however, were soured by the sense that between them they had selfishly consumed valuable time she could have spent with her husband, and that by encouraging his studies they had somehow contributed to his death.1
For months, Emma was unable to control her sobbing. Francis’s death left her feeling cheated: four and a half short years of marriage, with so much to look forward to, now lost. The family was worried by her state of mind. Six weeks after the funeral, her sister-in-law Lettice, anxious that Emma was giving way to ‘excessive grief’, wrote to her saying: ‘Take heede you provoke not God to goe further on in smiteing; and though you have lost ye greatest losse yet doe not think you have lost all.’
Half a year later, Emma’s father wrote to her concerned by her ‘melancholy humour’ and the fact that she had ‘little mind of doeing anything but what necessity compels you’. Reminding her that she had three young children to care for, he urged her to cheer up her spirits. But Emma’s spirits took another knock when her other sister-in-law, Francis’s sister Katherine, then living at Middleton, lost her own husband.2 Emma’s grief was protracted and a third of a century after Francis’s death her memory of him remained vivid and her loss acute.
Still anxious over Emma’s state of mind, Lettice wrote to her in December 1673 offering to bring her a tame magpie that she thought would cheer her and the children. A friend had a talking magpie he wanted to get rid of, ‘kept in a cage and twill speak many words very plaine’. Lettice thought the children would ‘delight in it’, adding ‘as I did myself when the days were that I delighted in anything’. She then says that she would have brought it without asking, but was then concerned that Emma might be worried that the bird would distract the children from their lessons, ‘besides tis a little curst [cursed] if [one] come[s] too neer his cage [he] will put out his bill and catch at fingers or anything he can lite on, but that is easily prevented with care. Let me have an answer for I stop disposing of him till I hear.’ Magpies do have a surprisingly hard nip, as anyone who has caught a wild one, or had one as a pet, will testify. Fewer will have heard a talking magpie, and Lettice is right, it would have delighted Emma’s children, for the voice in which magpies speak is utterly bewitching – a friend of mine had one that recited several nursery rhymes in their entirety.
It isn’t known whether the magpie made it to Middleton. It may have done, for in writing the Ornithology, Ray (who was living there then) says: ‘The bird is easily taught to speak, and that very plainly. We ourselves have known many, which had learned to imitate mans voice, and speak articulately with that exactness, that they would pronounce whole sentences so like to human speech, that had you not seen the birds you would have sworn it had been man that spoke.’3
Following Francis’s funeral, Ray devised a structure for the ornithology book. Not only did he have to read everything previously published on birds, he had to evaluate the material and compare the descriptions made by different authors and assess whether particular species were the same as or different from those he and Willughby had seen.
The existing literature was much more extensive than one might think, for in addition to the three standard bird texts by Conrad Gessner, Pierre Belon and Ulisse Aldrovandi, as well as William Turner’s little book on the birds of Aristotle and Pliny, there were several volumes describing the birds of foreign parts. These included Georg Marcgraf and Willem Piso’s book on the birds of Dutch Brazil; a volume on exotic birds and other animals of the Dutch colonies by the Flemish physician Charles de L’Escluse (also known as Clusius); and Francisco Hernandez’s work on the wildlife of Mexico. All substantial tomes. There was also Giovanni Pietro Olina’s Uccelliera on cage birds, and the attractively illustrated but otherwise uninformative book De Avibus by Jan Jonston – later described as ‘a hack writer with no firsthand knowledge of birds’.4 Regardless, they all had to be assessed.
Willughby had a large personal library, and he and Ray were extremely well read both inside and outside natural history. They were familiar, for example, with William Harvey’s On Generation, the catalogue to the massive cabinet of the Danish physician Ole Worm (Wormius), Museum Wormianum, and Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Ferdinand Magellan’s epic expedition to circumnavigate the globe, all of which contained valuable oddments of ornithological information.5
Some of these volumes contained illustrations of birds, but Willughby and Ray also searched more widely to find what they considered the most accurate images of particular species. In the end, the Ornithology contained illustrations from a wide variety of published and unpublished sources. Among the former, those from Aldrovandi, Piso and Olina are most frequently used, but the published sources also include a few images from the Flemish engraver Adriaen Collaert, the Spanish Jesuit mystic Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, Clusius and Worm. Unpublished images included paintings they borrowed from their friends and Royal Society colleagues, including Philip Skippon, Thomas Browne and Walter Charleton; and, of course, Willughby had his own images, including those in Baldner’s book, purchased while on his travels
.6
John Ray incorporated advice, information and details of specimens that Willughby and he had acquired from their regular correspondents, including Martin Lister, Francis Jessop, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir Philip Skippon and Ralph Johnson. Their colleagues Christopher Merret and Walter Charleton, both Fellows of the Royal Society, were busy conducting their own bird projects during the 1660s. Merret was a physician, and a ‘difficult’ man, who suffered from melancholy and depression. In 1666 he published an incomplete alphabetical list of ‘all’ known British birds, plants, butterflies and minerals, entitled Pinax Rerum Naturalis Britannicarum (An index of British natural things), which included some brief notes on a few species sent to him by Willughby.
Two years later, in 1668, Walter Charleton published his list of birds and other animals, in a book entitled Onomasticon Zoicon plerorumque animalium differentias (A zoological glossary expounding the distinguishing features and proper names of most animals), the birds largely comprising those mentioned in the works of other authors and the birds present in the Royal menagerie in St James’s Park, London, and in the Royal Society’s museum. The Onomasticon included six lifesize monochrome etchings of birds on folding pages, and all quite well executed – a hawfinch, crossbill, ‘benefico’ (a small, unidentified songbird), bee-eater, hoopoe (a rare vagrant to Britain, killed near London!) and a pin-tailed sandgrouse, all based on paintings by an unknown artist owned by the English politician, Sir Thomas Crew. Neither Ray, nor presumably Francis Willughby, thought much of either Merret or Charleton’s works, and curiously, to my mind, resisted the temptation of recycling any of Charleton’s bird pictures in the Ornithology.7
A hoopoe from Charleton’s Onomasticon (1668).
Compiling and organising all this information into a seamless whole was a tremendous task for Ray. In contrast, putting quill to paper and writing the text must have seemed relatively easy, even though the book would eventually comprise one-third of a million words.
The cornerstone of the Ornithology was the ‘arrangement’ (or classification) of birds. As John Wilkins had made clear to Willughby and Ray soon after they met in 1660, classification was the key to ‘organised knowledge’ – of anything, whether it be words and games, or animals and plants – and part of the new science. With a reliable classification of birds, you could build on that to flesh out the biology.
From early on in their partnership Willughby and Ray recognised that the unambiguous identification of birds (and other organisms) was essential and could be attained only by developing and employing a systematic methodology. A system was vital to ensure accurate and consistent descriptions of both the outside and inside of birds. Armed with good descriptions, which provided a reasonably clear idea of the boundaries between species, they were in a strong position to evaluate the similarities and differences between different birds and create a classification.
Previous attempts at bird classification by the likes of Belon and Aldrovandi suffered from several shortcomings. Their lack of a consistent methodology, for example, meant that much of their identification was ambiguous, resulting in the ‘multiplication’ of species. Add to this their poor choice of classificatory criteria and here was an altogether shaky foundation on which to build.
As the new science unfolded, the need for a robust classificatory system became increasingly obvious and several of Willughby and Ray’s contemporaries were tempted to try their luck. Walter Charleton’s arrangement of birds, first discussed at the Royal Society in 1662 and published in 1668, serves as a model for everything that Willughby and Ray felt was wrong with natural history. Charleton, educated at Oxford and tutored by John Wilkins, trained as a physician but ended up more of a writer than a medical practitioner. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1662, yet the new science seems to have passed him by and his classification of birds is distinctly Aristotelian in its approach. The ornithologist Erwin Stresemann later said of Charleton’s classification: ‘nothing could more clearly demonstrate the uselessness of supposedly Aristotelian principles for avian classification than [this] which defies common sense’.8
In contrast, the scheme created by another colleague, Ralph Johnson, a clergyman-naturalist based in Brignall in North Yorkshire, was apparently much better. Ray says that both he and Willughby were ‘informed’ by it, suggesting that Johnson had some good ideas. They were also reassured by his arrangement of birds since it confirmed many of their own suggestions. Sadly, we know nothing of Johnson’s scheme.9
The basis for Willughby and Ray’s arrangement of birds was anatomy: feet and beaks principally. Centuries earlier Pliny the Elder had pointed out that ‘The first and most important distinguishing characteristic among birds is the feet.’ In 1575 the Dutch anatomist Volcher Coiter, one of Aldrovandi’s pupils, also used anatomical features – mainly feet – to create a dichotomous classification of birds, but curiously, Willughby and Ray seem not to have known of his work. On the other hand, they probably were familiar with two other sixteenth-century writers, the anti-Aristotelian scholar Pierre de La Ramée and the travel writer Theodor Zwinger, both of whom popularised the idea of dichotomous keys.10
Armed with their detailed descriptions, Willughby and Ray started their new classification, dividing birds initially into landfowl and waterfowl, as several of their predecessors had done, but then – and this was the novel aspect – using details of beaks and feet and a few other features, such as body size, to create successive subdivisions.
Landfowl, for example, were divided into those with either (i) curved beaks, or (ii) straight beaks and claws. Then, for the latter group, these were divided into three categories based on body size: large, medium and small birds. Large birds were very large and included the ostrich, cassowary and dodo. Middle-sized birds were further divided according to whether their beak was ‘large, thick and strong’ (crows and woodpeckers) or ‘small and short’ (pigeons, poultry and thrushes). The birds in the latter category were further divided by the colour of their flesh: birds with light flesh were poultry (a feature that Willughby and Ray felt was unique); birds with dark flesh were either large (‘pigeon-kind’) or small (‘thrush-kind’).11
Part of Willughby and Ray’s classification, redrawn from the Ornithology, ‘A table of land-fowl’, p. 54, showing a section of their not quite dichotomous key (note the three options, rather than two, for body size on the left). Criteria are in uppercase. The final parts on the right-hand side, for example ‘thrush-kind’, direct the reader to the relevant chapters where they can read individual descriptions to establish which of the various thrush-like birds they have in front of them.
Willughby and Ray recognised that the function of such branching keys was twofold. The first was to reveal the ‘true’ arrangement of animals and plants, as devised by God and invariably elusive because it wasn’t always obvious that God wanted anyone to fully know His plan. The second was an arrangement whose aim was to aid identification.12
It is this second type of arrangement that is included in the Ornithology, as Ray explains in the Preface:
By so accurately describing each kind [of bird], and observing their characteristic and distinctive notes [features] that the reader might be sure of our meaning [i.e. which species] and upon comparing any bird with our description not fail of discerning whether it be described or no.13
In other words, by using the Ornithology’s detailed descriptions, a reader should be able to identify any particular species, or establish whether it has previously been described or not. Ray continues:
Nor will it be difficult to find out any unknown bird that shall be offered: for comparing it with the tables first, the characteristic notes [features] of the genus’s from the highest or first downward will easily guide him to the lowest genus; among the species whereof, being not many, by comparing it also with the several descriptions the bird may soon be found.14
What he means here is that if someone finds an unfamiliar bird specimen, then using the tables (the keys) the individual will
be led to smaller and smaller groupings – as Ray says – until these are sufficiently small that it won’t be too onerous for that person to read the species descriptions in order to match the specimen with a particular species.
What I don’t think Willughby and Ray’s arrangement allowed one to do – because this is an identification guide rather than a ‘true’ classification – was to classify a new species.
On the other hand, when I tried their scheme with a European bird that Willughby and Ray did not really know – the pin-tailed sandgrouse (see page 142) – I was surprised by the outcome. A land bird, obviously, and with a short beak, short claws (clearly not talons), and middle sized, but then I’m stuck because I don’t know what colour its flesh is. Regardless of whether the flesh is pale or dark, Willughby and Ray’s table suggests that the sandgrouse is either of the poultry-kind or pigeon-kind. This is pretty remarkable given that subsequent ornithologists classified sandgrouse first as a kind of grouse (i.e. closely related to poultry) and later as a kind of pigeon (because of the sandgrouse’s unusual ability to drink by sucking, a trait shared with pigeons).
The reason that Willughby and Ray failed to include the sandgrouse in the ornithology was because they had only a painting to go on, and they didn’t trust the artist’s depiction. I suspect that had they had a specimen in front of them, they would have done at least as well as some later taxonomists in considering it some kind of poultry or pigeon.
The arrangement that Willughby and Ray eventually came up with is both ingenious and effective. The secret of its success was in finding those criteria that worked. There were so many possibilities – quantifying the number of flight feathers, the size of the gizzard, and the number of liver lobes – that finding the right ones was a stroke of genius. It was for this reason that subsequent authors revered Willughby and Ray. Indeed, when Carl Linnaeus, who is much better known than either of them, came to write his Systema Naturae, he failed (or refused – arrogant man that he was) to recognise that the arrangement created by his two predecessors was superior to his own.15