by Tim Birkhead
Almost a year after Francis’s death John Ray married Margaret Oakley, governess of the Willughby children at Middleton. Ray was forty-four and Margaret twenty. Their courtship had started before Willughby died, but completely unaware of it, Francis had said in a conversation with Emma that he didn’t think Ray would ever marry; instead, he thought Ray would continue to live at Middleton, or wherever Emma chose to reside, and take care of her and educate their children. When Emma suggested to Francis that Ray might marry their sons’ maid, he ‘smiled at the conceipt & would not beleeve it’.16
The marriage – conducted by the family’s curate, George Antrobus, on 5 June 1673 – began badly as Ray was unable to fulfil his connubial duties. Suffering from both erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation, he sought advice from Martin Lister. He in turn prescribed Diasatyria – crushed ‘Spanish fly’ (actually a beetle, or one of several species known as blister beetles). Its key constituent, cantharidin, acts – at an appropriate dose – as a gentle irritant on the genital and urinary tract, thereby increasing blood flow and facilitating erection. Transcribing Ray’s correspondence after his death, his friend William Derham destroyed most of the letters dealing with Ray’s sexual dysfunction, and it was only through the careful research by the historian Anna Marie Roos that Ray’s correspondence with Lister was subsequently discovered.17
Cantharidin has been known as a sexual stimulant since ancient times. But it was also recognised that higher doses could be lethal. In 1772 the Marquis de Sade almost killed two prostitutes at one of his orgies by giving them aniseed-flavoured sweets laced with too much cantharidin.18
Nine years before Francis’s death, in 1663 while in Modena, northern Italy, Willughby and Ray had come across a great bustard for sale in the market. This enormous bird – among the largest of all flying birds – still bred in Cambridgeshire and other parts of England at that time, but they were unaware that it also occurred in Italy. Suspended by its neck, the bird’s gorgeous russet and white plumage seemed more like fine fabric than feathers. What neither Willughby nor Ray could have known was that the males of this species ‘self-medicate’ with blister beetles during the breeding season, presumably to enhance their sexual performance. Male bustards, like the ruffs mentioned earlier, congregate and compete at special display grounds each spring to secure copulations from passing females. In their efforts to impress, the males seem to turn themselves inside out in a most unbird-like feathery extravaganza. As with all lekking birds, the competition between males is so intense it is hardly surprising that some are tempted to enhance their performance with dangerous substances.19
The blister beetles must also have worked for Ray since he eventually fathered twin daughters Margaret and Mary in 1682, and a third daughter, Catherine, in 1687. Later, when discussing reproduction in The Wisdom of God, Ray asked, rhetorically perhaps, why there should be ‘implanted in each sex such a vehement and inexpugnable appetite for copulation?’ I wonder whether this particular phrase was prompted either by his frustration at not being able, at least initially, to make the most of his marriage, or possibly by the consequence of Lister’s cure. In the light of natural selection the answer to Ray’s query seems obvious, but in those pre-Darwinian days it was much more than a rhetorical question.
Overwhelmed by the family’s expectations of him and by the effort needed to bring the bird book to fruition, Ray wrote to Peter Courthope in January 1674 saying that ‘The death of Mr Willughby hath cast more businesse upon me than I would willingly have undertooke.’20
Two events that followed in rapid succession precipitated more change and further difficulties. In July 1675, Willughby’s mother, the seventy-year-old Middleton matriarch Lady Cassandra, died. Ray had known for some time that without her backing his position in the Middleton household would be precarious at best. In a letter to Peter Courthope he had said that he would probably remain at Middleton ‘at least so long as my old lady lives’. And certainly, soon after her death he and Margaret moved out, setting up home first at Coleshill (about seven miles south of Middleton) and in April the following year at Sutton Coldfield (some three miles from Middleton). Then, in August 1676, after Willughby’s widow married Josiah Child, governor of the East India Company, she and the children left Middleton to live with him at Wanstead Manor, in Essex, a property so magnificent it became known as the English Versailles.
In May of that year Emma’s sister-in-law Lettice had urged her to consider marrying again, writing to say: ‘being in ye floure [flower] of your age tis pitty if God pleased you should passé ye remainder of your days in solitude’. However, by that time Emma’s father Henry Barnard may have already arranged the union with Child, motivated to make the Middleton estates financially secure. At the same time, Barnard acknowledged that caring for the children from Josiah Child’s two previous marriages might not be easy for Emma. Although her marriage to Child did secure the financial future of the Middleton estate – he was an avaricious and ruthless businessman – it came at an enormous cost to Emma, to the Willughby children, and to John Ray himself. Josiah Child was the polar opposite of Francis in every respect and soon proved himself to be a less than ideal husband and stepfather.
Apart from the soured relationship between Emma and Ray and the fact that her new husband also disliked him, the closure of Middleton meant that Ray no longer had access to Willughby’s books and papers. This probably mattered relatively little for the ornithology project that Ray had completed by December 1674, but for the fish and insect projects it was to prove a serious impediment.21
Just before Christmas 1675 the printers sent Ray copies of the Ornithology, whose official publication date was 1676. Written in Latin, its title celebrated Ray’s patron and collaborator: Francisci Willughbeii: Ornithologiae Libri Tres. Spectacular in its scope, this was also the most ‘scientific’ book on natural history so far, with none of the hieroglyphs, pandects (lengthy treatises) and emblematics (moral guidance) that cluttered the pages of most previous books on birds.
The writing was by Ray, who had used both Willughby’s notes – now lost – as well as his own. As Ray says in the Preface, their aim was to illustrate the history of birds, by which he meant the results of their own investigations.22 The Ornithology was designed as a system for understanding how different species of birds are related to each other: their natural order. This in turn depended crucially on correct identification, which in turn was based on the ‘distinguishing marks’ of each species.
Ray at least believed that God in His wisdom had created a fixed (albeit unknown) number of species.23 The identification of some birds, such as the bullfinch, for example, was straightforward: the male’s breast being a vivid pink, while that of the female is a gentle puce, and that of the immature a rich russet; and crucially all of them distinct from other finch species. Some birds, however, required more effort, as Ray relates with regard to the jack snipe: ‘I sometimes following the vulgar [common] error, thought it not to differ from the Snipe [common snipe] in kind, but only in sex, taking it to be the cock-snipe. But after being advised by Mr. M. Lister, I found it to differ specifically: for dissecting several of these small ones [i.e. Jack snipe] some proved to be males, some females.’24
Ray and Willughby differed in the way they thought information should best be conveyed, with Ray inclined towards written descriptions and Willughby more in favour of illustrations. Ray, after all, had relied on careful, often vivid descriptions of plants in his previous books – not least because he was unable to afford engravings. Willughby on the other hand was wealthy enough to purchase images and had clearly anticipated using those he bought as the bases for illustrations in the Ornithology. However, it simply was not possible to depict the distinguishing marks of each species in the illustrations, and these are restricted to written descriptions. In some cases, of course, they are there if you scrutinise the images closely enough, but in contrast with some contemporary field guides, they are not obvious.
For Ray, wri
tten descriptions were hugely important. When Henry Oldenburg offered to have engravings made of some exotic birds as the Ornithology was being prepared in 1674, Ray responded by first accepting Oldenburg’s offer, but also adding that:
I must entreat some friend to take description of them in words, I mean their bigness, shape of the whole body, & particularly of their bills, feet and claws, colour of their bills legs and feathers, especially of their wings & tails, the length & figure of their tails & any other considerable or distinctive accident.25
This is a telling comment, for contrary to the popular saying, a picture is not always worth a thousand words. An image – and especially a seventeenth-century black and white engraving – conveys only so much. It cannot convey any aesthetic sense of the bird; nor can it communicate overall body size or be sufficiently detailed to show Willughby’s distinguishing marks, such as the exact number of feathers in the wing and tail. The truth is that written descriptions and images together provided the material necessary to provoke the reader’s imagination and create a mental likeness of a bird.
There is some extraordinary evidence for just how effective the Ornithology’s written descriptions are. When John Ray was arranging the production of a coloured copy of the volume as a gift for Samuel Pepys, the (unknown) artist had to rely almost entirely on the text, both for the colours themselves, but also for the region of the bird’s body to which they were applied. Remarkably, in all but a couple of instances, this was done quite accurately.26
As well as detailed written descriptions, Willughby and Ray both recognised that the identification of species was enhanced by good illustrations. It was precisely for this reason that Willughby had so assiduously sought, and where necessary purchased or commissioned, colour images of birds during their travels. Many of those they acquired – such as Leonhard Baldner’s book of paintings – were used in the production of the engravings. In other cases, they used images from earlier publications, some of which were excellent, like the finches and larks in Olina’s Uccelliera.27 On the other hand, they sometimes had no option but to use very poor pictures, such as those in Georg Marcgraf and Willen Piso’s book of Brazilian birds.28 The birds in that volume were unknown outside South America and their Portuguese names – such as Pitangaguacul or Yzquauhtli – were incomprehensible and unpronounceable. But because their goal was to describe all known birds, Willughby and Ray were compelled to include those images even though they were unhelpful and the names unfathomable.29
At least three of the images included in the Ornithology are of exotic birds that were, or had been, on display in St James’s Park, London. As somewhere to walk with his dogs, courtiers and mistresses, Charles II had had the park restored and restocked with ‘An abundance of fowl, and of several sorts, viz., both of land and water, viz., cranes, storks, shovelars, pelicans, ets … Peacocks, peahens, a white raven … partridges … outlandish geese, ducks of several shapes, collours and sizes.’ Willughby and Ray visited the park sometime between the late 1660s and early 1670s and were undoubtedly thrilled by the various unusual species on view, and by three in particular: the ostrich, cassowary and an Egyptian goose. It seems that the king commissioned Francis Barlow, already fashionable among the aristocracy for his depictions of birds and other animals, to create lifesized oil paintings of these particular species. It was from these paintings that the engravings used in the Ornithology were made. Frustratingly, we do not know how this came about: were Willughby and Ray invited to see the paintings and did they then seek permission from the king to have engravings made? Rather surprisingly, Ray is silent on this point in the Ornithology.30
It was sometimes hard for Willughby and Ray to know whether a description in the works of other authors referred to a real bird or to some mythological beast. Ingeniously, Ray dealt with this by including an appendix of what he referred to as ‘Such birds as we suspect for fabulous’. Among these were some fantasy species, such as the phoenix. But there were others that subsequently turned out to be genuine, such as the hoatzin that Ray correctly describes as living in hot countries and ‘very often is found sitting in trees by rivers’; and less accurately, that it ‘feeds upon snakes’ (it is vegetarian), and ‘its bones asswage the pain of any part of a man’s body by launcing’. Untested as far as I know, but unlikely.31
Another problematical bird was one mentioned originally by Antonio Pigafetta, who as noted had travelled with Magellan to the Philippines and East Indies in the early 1500s. The ‘daie’ was said to lay a great abundance of enormous eggs that were buried in ‘deep vaults within the ground’ and hatched without ever being incubated. Because this seemed stranger than fiction, Ray rejected it, writing: ‘I dare boldly say that this history [account] is altogether fabulous.’ He was wrong, for the daie is the Philippine megapode, one of several species of large-footed birds that dig cavities in either warm volcanic soil or mounds of rotting vegetation to deposit and hatch their eggs. Given what was known about birds in the mid-1600s, and the extraordinary biology of these and other megapodes, Ray and Willughby were right to be cautious.
The Ornithology is, as indicated by its Latin title – Libri Tres – made up of three books or parts. These are preceded by a Preface, in which Ray describes how the book came about and celebrates Francis Willughby. Book one is an overview of bird biology – essentially, what birds are and how they work – spanning sixteen pages. This is followed by the account of some ‘English’ seabird colonies – and Francis Willughby’s questions that we discussed in the preceding chapter. These pages are followed by their classification, and a catalogue (list) of English birds. Books two and three cover Willughby and Ray’s two major divisions of birds: land birds and waterfowl, species by species.
The final decision about what to include and what to exclude from the Ornithology lay with Ray. He states in the Preface that they present only what properly relates to natural history and included only material they can ‘warrant upon our own knowledge’ and ‘what we approve’. It is rather surprising, then, to find within the book’s pages some comments derived from ancient Greek and Roman authors on the use of birds in medicine, including swallows as a cure for ‘falling sickness’ or epilepsy.32 On the other hand, the presence of this kind of information provides a revealing picture of the state of medicine in Willughby’s day – certainly, there is no hint of scepticism. For example, Ray regurgitates Galen’s notion that a crested lark roasted or boiled will assuage colic pains,33 and Aetius’s assertion that the wren is the ‘perfect cure’ for kidney or bladder stones ‘being salted and eaten raw, or being burnt in a pot … and the ashes of one whole bird taken at once’.34 Similar curative properties are ascribed to the pied wagtail, but Ray refers to Alexander Benedictus who thinks that ‘modern physicians’ may have muddled wagtails and wrens, adding that Conrad Gessner thought ‘it matters not much what birds be burnt, sith [since] the vertue of the ashes of almost all birds seem to be the same’. I suspect Gessner was correct.
Ray is more sceptical about non-medical folklore involving birds, relating the ‘vulgar persuasion’ (common belief) that the kingfisher ‘being hung up on an untwined thread by the bill in any room, will turn its breast to that quarter of the Heaven whence the wind blows’. He then adds – sarcastically, I think – ‘He that doubt of it may try it.’35
The Ornithology is a blockbuster, a massive compendium of ornithological knowledge. It is indicative of Ray’s organisational genius that he presents the information in a way that has survived the passage of time, for the book’s layout provided a model for virtually all subsequent bird encyclopedias.
Despite Willughby and Ray’s excellent ‘arrangement’ of birds, the classification of animals – including birds – continued to be, and continues to be, a monumental issue for zoologists. In the 350 years since Willughby and Ray, classification has continued to preoccupy ornithology, and during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the study of birds consisted of little else. There was a brief hope that Darwin’s theory of
evolution by natural selection in the mid-1800s would provide the key to unlock the secret, but avian classification continued to confound even the most dedicated ornithologists. Classification became the domain of museum men measuring and perusing the preserved skins and skeletons of birds from around the world.36 Few bothered to look at how birds behaved or what they did in the wild – because it was felt that behaviour or ecology would add little or nothing to their ongoing classificatory campaign. It was not until the early twentieth century that behaviour was considered a worthwhile taxonomic criterion, and not until the early twenty-first century that molecular tools were sufficiently honed that they could be employed to provide a truly objective – and what we now assume to be a fairly accurate – picture of how different groups of birds evolved and are related to each other. Interestingly, despite its initial promise, molecular biology has not yet provided all the answers because some groups of birds, such as gulls for example, diversified so rapidly in their history that the differences in their DNA, examined so far, are too small to unambiguously distinguish their evolutionary pathways.37
At the very end of the Ornithology are eighty plates, depicting 380 individual birds. Their inconvenient location at the back of the book, separated from their relevant text, is a consequence of metal engraving. The woodcuts used previously by the likes of Conrad Gessner and Pierre Belon permitted printers to place images and text on the same page, but those images were very crude compared with what could be achieved by metal engraving.