The Wonderful Mr Willughby

by Tim Birkhead

  A page from Pierre Belon’s (1555) bird book, L’Histoire de la Nature des Oyseaux, showing the text and woodcut together.

  The plates for the Ornithology were produced by William Faithorne (who also created an excellent portrait of John Ray), William Sherwin and Frederick van Howe, London engravers employed by the Royal Society’s printer John Martyn. The results were mixed, with some more lifelike than others, reflecting a combination of what was often poor material to start with, a dearth of ornithological experience among the engravers, and the lack of anyone to oversee their production. Ray was disappointed, and says so in the Preface:

  The gravers we employed, though they were very good workmen, yet in many sculps they have not satisfied me. For I being a great distance from London, and all advices and directions necessarily passing by letter, sometimes through haste mistook my directions, sometimes through weariness and impatience of long writing sent not so clear and full instructions as was requisite, as they often neglected their instructions, or mistook my meaning.38

  Unless you know someone who has been involved in producing a copiously illustrated book, even with the advantage of today’s technology it is difficult to imagine just how much effort Ray must have expended in organising the images for their book. Little wonder then that there are a few glitches, with one or two species, such as the blackbird and Royston (hooded) crow, appearing twice, and some species curiously placed, as with the yellow wagtail among the gulls and terns.39

  Just reading and checking the proofs of over 300 pages of text must have also been an enormous task. But Ray was an efficient, systematic worker, and I can easily see him sitting down with a pile of page proofs and methodically going through them to check for errors. He did so with meticulous care, for the finished book contains very few mistakes.

  Plate 40 from the Ornithology showing (from top to bottom): yellowhammer Emberiza citrinella, corn bunting E. calandra, ortolan bunting E. hortulana, skylark Alauda arvensis, woodlark Lullula arborea, crested lark Galerida cristata (bottom left), all redrawn from Olina (1622). Interestingly, the bird Willughby and Ray thought was a yellowhammer in Olina, and the one labelled as such in their Ornithology (top right here), is actually a cirl bunting E. cirlus, as Olina’s text makes clear: ‘its head is the colour of a serin, greenish-yellow’.

  As soon as Ray received copies of the Ornithology from the printers, he sent one to Martin Lister to thank him for his help. Lister responded by writing to say how pleased he was to have it, but that Ray should produce an edition in English, because he felt (correctly as it happened) that the Latin version would have limited appeal. Lister also suggested some additions that he thought would make the book more attractive to the book-buying public, including a section on hawks (and falconry) and ‘some account of the keeping and ordering of [song] birds in cages’. For the latter he recommended two recent books from which Ray might glean the appropriate information: The Gentleman’s Recreation (1674) by Nicholas Cox and Epitome of the Art of Husbandry (1669) by Joseph Blagrave. Ray ordered the books and read them, but he was unimpressed. He wrote back to Lister on 4 April 1676 pointing out in his perceptive way that Cox’s book was simply a plagiarised version of The Art of Fowling published in 1621 by Gervase Markham, and that most of the material in Blagrave’s book was similarly lifted, from the works by Aldrovandi and Olina. The only section in Epitome that Ray thought might be original referred to the breeding of canaries that were just starting to become popular as cage birds in Britain and on the continent. Regarding the plagiarists, Lister responded: ‘This sort of men being the bane and pest of learning, and you ought to brand them.’40

  Lister also recommended including an account of Faeroese seabirds by the Danish priest, Lucas Jacobsen Debes. This was published initially in Danish in 1673, but as Lister knew it had just, in 1676, appeared in an English translation. At the time Ray was writing, there were no copyright laws and nothing to protect authors from plagiarism, and Ray reproduced Debes’s account verbatim, but at least he acknowledged its author.

  That Ray agreed so readily to Lister’s suggestions may have been because he held him in such high regard and recognised his sound judgement, but also because for his own financial security he needed the Ornithology to be a commercial success. Ray may also have acquiesced to Lister’s suggestions as a goodwill gesture to make amends for a disagreement they had had a few years earlier. That disagreement was significant not just at a personal level, but because it marked a change in the way practitioners of the new science dealt with discoveries. The dispute concerned the ballooning behaviour of spiders.

  On the roof terrace of a tall house in Spain the mountainside opposite me lies in deep shade. The late afternoon sun lights up a billion airborne flecks in the same way a projector lamp lights dust in a room. The warm breeze is blowing insects, other invertebrates and the feathery seeds of numerous plants horizontally along the mountainside. In among this mass of aerial plankton are also the diaphanous threads of hundreds of strands of spider silk. Unlike the horizontal trajectories of the seeds and insects, the silken threads hang almost vertically, gently undulating and only occasionally catching the light and becoming visible. I initially imagine the threads to be just a metre or so long, but as I watch, I realise that some are enormous – over ten metres in length.

  More than three centuries before, Martin Lister had seen something similar:

  [I]‌n close attending on one [spider] … I saw her suddenly … turning her tail into the wind, to dart out a thread with the same violence that water spouts out of a spring; this thread, taken up by the wind, was in a moment emitted some fathoms long, still issuing out of the belly of the animal; by and by the spider leaped into the air and the thread mounted her up swiftly.41

  This is how spiders reach new habitats, and under certain weather conditions at particular times of year the air seems to be filled with their diaphanous linear parachutes. It is a sight as intriguing and beautiful today as it was when Lister first noticed it. Lister told Ray of his discovery, who without the former’s knowledge related it to others with the unfortunate result that Lister’s finding was published anonymously in the Royal Society’s Transactions.42 Lister was understandably annoyed, but the situation was made worse when a certain Dr Edward Hulse – a friend of Ray’s – capitalised on the circumstances by claiming the discovery as his own.4344 Priority was beginning to matter. Before the advent of the new science and scientific journals, who had discovered what was not really an issue, but as the scientific revolution rolled forward, priority became increasingly important as scientific endeavour and discovery began to serve self-advancement.

  Acutely competitive, Martin Lister felt the lack of credit keenly, which is ironic because he seemed to have had little compunction about capitalising on the unpublished findings of his friends. On hearing that Willughby and Ray were studying sap and insect reproduction, for example, he immediately began his own research on those topics without crediting either of them. Even so, in the case of the aerial spiders, Ray was in the wrong and keen to make amends.

  Taking Lister’s advice, Ray immediately began working on an English edition of the Ornithology, using the opportunity to make a few improvements to the Latin text. He included a more extended eulogy about Willughby; he identified those species that neither he nor Willughby had dissected themselves with an asterisk in the margin so it was clear that the description was based on the work of others. Ray also made an effort to make the text more user-friendly, to the extent of adding a little joke about a white blackbird, if the reader would ‘pardon the seeming contradiction’. The English edition also included two additional plates to complement the new text on fowling: one comprising eight separate images taken from Olina’s Uccelliera and the other consisting of two images from Markham’s The Art of Fowling.

  Ray also added a paragraph to the Preface to mention a change he considered making to the English edition, but didn’t. This paragraph is a brief comment on the ‘wholesomeness’ of the fle
sh of birds as part of our diet. Pointing out that the individual species accounts include some notes on the palatability of birds, Ray also states that, because many authors have included similar information in the ‘dietical part of their institution of physic’, he provides only a summary. It consists of four points:

  1.The flesh of carnivorous birds is not worth eating; nor is that of ‘the crow-kind’– that is, corvids, such as rooks, crows, jackdaws, jays and magpies, which feed ‘promiscuously upon flesh, fruit or seeds’.

  2.Birds that feed on insects, such as woodpeckers and swallows, are not good to eat either, although ‘small birds of slender bills that are reputed good [to eat] … feed as well on fruits and berries … but are best when they feed upon fruits, as the Beccafigo [blackcap or other warblers] in fig-time’, which means when they are fattening up for migration.

  3.‘The birds that feed upon grain and seed only … as the poultry kind, are best of all.’

  4.‘Waterfowl, such as feed only or chiefly on fish are not good meat; yet the young of some of these are approved as a delicacy, though I scarce think wholeseome: such are young soland-geese [gannet], puffins [Manx shearwaters rather than Atlantic puffins, I think], pewets [black-headed gulls] and herons.’

  Ray then says that waterfowl, ducks and geese, although feeding on insects, are ‘esteemed good to eat and admitted to our tables’, adding that ‘The most delicate of these are those we have termed mud-suckers, that with their long nebs [beaks] thrust into the earth suck out of the mud or ouse [ooze] a fatty juice, by which they are nourished.’ A ‘fatty juice’ sounds remarkably unspecific. Further on in the main body of the Ornithology’s text Ray elaborates slightly by defining mud-suckers as having very long bills, either ‘crooked’ (curved) as the curlew, or ‘streight’ as the woodcock, ‘which suck out of the mud or channels some oyly [oily] slime or juyce, wherewith they are nourished: whence they have delicate flesh, and their very guts not emptied or cleaned from [of] the excrements are usually eaten’. In case this is not clear, Ray is referring here to the habit of cooking these mud-sucking birds without removing or cleaning the guts, and indeed, eating the guts along with the breast and leg muscles. This is a habit that still persists today with those that eat woodcock and snipe: oh yes, and although Ray doesn’t mention this, the head is left on, so that the brain can be eaten too.45

  In the individual species accounts, Ray states that birds such as woodcock, curlew and snipe eat worms and insects, but I presume the reason for his assuming that the main diet of mud-suckers consists of ‘oyly slime’ is because the soft-bodied worms that form the main part of their diet are rapidly digested and leave little identifiable trace within the gut when dissected. Closely linked to this is the widespread belief that when a woodcock or a snipe is flushed from the ground (before being shot), it defecates, and for these reasons it is acceptable to eat their guts.

  Guts apart, the woodcock, along with the grey partridge, was among the most highly esteemed table birds. Ray writes:

  The leg especially is commended, in respect whereof the woodcock is preferred before the partridge itself, according to that English rhythm [rhyme]:

  If the Partridge had the Woodcocks thigh

  Twould be the best bird that ever did fly.46

  One reason, I think, why Ray includes this brief account of which birds are worth eating or not is because during his and Willughby’s continental travels they were often amazed by the birds – including hawks, corvids and starlings – that local people were prepared to eat, that no one in England, at least no one that Ray knew, would consider eating. The explanation for this geographical variation in what birds were considered palatable may simply have been a difference in tradition, or necessity. That people in Britain did not typically eat raptors, corvids or starlings is confirmed by Muffet’s book Health’s Improvement: raptors get no mention at all, and both corvids and starlings are not recommended as worth eating, except in the case of corvids, as nestlings.47

  The English version, entitled The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, was published in 1678 and, in contrast to the Latin edition, made no mention of Emma as the sponsor of the engravings. This isn’t too surprising, for by this time relations between her and Ray had degenerated to such an extent that he felt under no obligation to acknowledge her. We don’t know whether the English edition yielded the economic return Ray hoped for during his own lifetime, or indeed whether Emma benefited financially. But in terms of its impact on the study of birds the Ornithology was an unparalleled success.

  Plate 52 from the Ornithology showing (not to scale): white stork Ciconia ciconia (upper left), black stork C. nigra (upper right), Eurasian spoonbill Platalea leucorodia (lower left), and Eurasian bittern Botarus stellaris (lower right).

  At Wanstead meanwhile the situation between Josiah Child and his stepson Francis junior had deteriorated so much that, in June 1680, the twelve-year-old asked his uncle Lord Chandos, Francis Willughby’s brother-in-law, if he could come to live with him. Chandos, however, was horrified at the prospect of having to care for young Francis and urged him to return to his mother. Instead, Francis junior ran away from Wanstead to his aunt, Francis’s sister Lettice Wendy, who lived at Haslingfield in Cambridgeshire. Dismayed by the boy’s sudden appearance, she nonetheless agreed to take him in.

  Francis junior’s unhappiness was largely down to his relationship with his unpleasant stepfather, and his escape from Wanstead may have been triggered by the death of his maternal grandfather, Henry Barnard, in April of that year. The departure of John Ray and Margaret Oakley, both of whom had taught the Willughby boys while at Middleton, must have further added to his distress. Josiah Child was clearly incapable of providing the love and care that the Willughby children had previously enjoyed, and Francis junior also made sure that his younger brother Thomas and sister Cassandra eventually left Wanstead as well.

  It is a measure of just how ‘sordidly avaricious’ Josiah Child was, that at one point he calculated how much his stepchildren had costhim from the day he married their mother, Emma. After Barnard’s death, Child also expected Francis Willughby’s executors to undertake more responsibility for the estate and the ongoing inheritance battle. He singled out Ray for a very personal attack, accusing him of dishonesty and insisting that he should live closer than Essex – where he and his family had moved after Ray’s mother died in 1679 – to justify the annuity by fulfilling his duties in educating Willughby’s children. Child also involved his wife in the attack on Ray. The issue was that Barnard had not identified a replacement for Sir Thomas Wendy as one of Willughby’s executors, after Wendy’s early death in November 1673. As an executor Ray felt that it was his role to nominate other executors. This did not go down well in the Child household, and Emma wrote an angry letter to Ray accusing him of ‘insufficiency, laziness and dishonesty’. He responded by firmly defending his position, reminding Emma that Francis Willughby had provided the annuity as ‘a free gift in token of his kindness and friendship’, adding that while he was prepared to assist with estate matters, he did not feel that Francis had assumed he would do so without help. He also reasserted that he was happy to oversee the education of her and Francis’s sons when they were older. In response, Child withheld Ray’s annuity for two years.48

  The atmosphere within the Child household was intolerable. Torn between loyalty to her children and to her ‘petty and controlling’ husband, Emma was distraught because her oldest son had run away to live elsewhere, and because her other two children, Thomas and Cassandra, were thinking of leaving too.

  After moving back to the house in which he had grown up, Ray began work on the fish book, announcing to Martin Lister in December 1674 that: ‘Having finished the History of Birds I am now beginning that of fishes’. Eighteen months later he wrote again, optimistic that Fishes would be finished within a year or two. It took eight years. Part of the delay was a waning enthusiasm for fish and a waxing of his own botanical books.49

  As well as using th
e notes he and Willughby had accumulated during their travels, Ray continued to seek additional fish specimens and information from colleagues. His Cambridge friend Peter Dent, an apothecary and a physician, asked his local fishmonger to keep an eye open for unusual species, and, in February 1675, Dent was able to send Ray a ten-pound thornback ray. He also told Ray how this same fishmonger had once sold a skate (or ‘flair’ as he called it) weighing over 200 pounds to the cook at St John’s College, Cambridge, where it fed all thirty scholars. Ray chose to include this story in his History of Fishes where, as is so often the case with fishermen’s tales, the flair had grown sufficiently large to feed 120 men.50

  The book’s formal title, Historia Piscium, reveals that like the first edition of the bird book it was written in Latin. Unlike the bird book, however, there was never an English edition, and apart from some small initial success, it has remained in relative obscurity ever since. I had some of it translated into English, and my overwhelming sensation is how glad I am that Ray himself translated the Ornithology into English. He knew exactly what he wanted to convey and translated the Latin with sufficient nuance that the English version reads beautifully and informatively. Had a non-ornithologist made the translation, I doubt whether the bird book would have been the success it is. By comparison, bits of the fish book are difficult reading, not because my translators didn’t know their Latin, but because they couldn’t know what it was that Ray wanted to say. It is analogous to a situation I sometimes experienced as a university teacher, when it was suggested that I deliver an undergraduate lecture based on someone else’s notes (or vice versa): it never really works.