The Wonderful Mr Willughby

by Tim Birkhead

  The fish book is organised in a similar way to the Ornithology in some respects, but it is very different in others. The overall aim was to provide a classification of fishes whose reliability was founded on accurate identification, which in turn was based on detailed physical descriptions and ‘characteristic marks’. As Ray states: ‘We particularly abhor the unnecessary multiplication of species’51 – a problem prevalent across the whole of natural history because variation in morphology routinely resulted in the same species being known by different names and considered different species. As with the Ornithology, Willughby and Ray’s account of the fishes excluded all myths and folklore and all those other tedious demonstrations of ‘copious knowledge’ favoured by their predecessors. The only concession was when folklore had some bearing on the biology of a particular species, such as the adage ‘as dead as a herring’, which accurately described how quickly that particular species expires out of water; or ‘as hale as a roach’ indicating the opposite.

  The History of Fishes comprises four parts: (i) an introduction to the biology of fish; (ii) cetaceans (whales and dolphins); (iii) cartilaginous fishes (sharks and rays); (iv) bony fishes, making up the bulk of the book.52 As Ray acknowledges, he was responsible for writing parts 1 and 2, and ‘edited’ the other two parts written largely by others. His structure, and hence classification, follows Aristotle rather than the more recent but less reliable Rondelet, who, as Ray says, sometimes separated species that are obviously closely related, such as splitting salmon from trout, and eels from congers.

  The classification in the History of Fishes is based very clearly on what Willughby produced in 1666 for John Wilkins’s Real Character, although it is also apparent that Ray was involved, for some of the fish mentioned are ones that only Ray had seen. Despite Wilkins’s irrational and wholly artificial imposition of nine categories, that is what Willughby used for the fishes, and pretty much the system that Ray was to employ in the fish volume.53

  Unless you are a fish enthusiast, and I suspect, even if you are one, the History of Fishes is hardly an exciting read. The book feels as though it has been written by committee, which of course it was. There are a few gems, however, and I particularly liked the account of the aptly named ‘crampfish’, that is, the electric ray or torpedo fish that Willughby and Ray encountered in Italy. Ray discusses its well-known ‘narcotic powers’, writing ‘I handled, skinned and dissected several with my own hands and got no sort of harm: so it is evidently confined to the living fish.’54 This is correct, but in life this species, which grows up to almost two metres in length, can deliver a powerful and debilitating electric shock.

  Ray also describes the startling effect of a red sea-bream:

  We bought a large specimen and kept it overnight in the room meaning to dissect it in the morning: lo, in the dark the whole fish shone marvellously like a glowing coal or red-hot iron: never before had we seen such a phenomenon.55

  This extraordinary sight was – we now know – the result of a very specific bioluminescent bacterium. Most bacteria that emit light produce a blue-green glow, but those in the genus Vibrio emit a beautiful yellow-orange light. It may even have been as a result of this glowing bream, mentioned perhaps in conversation, that Ray’s fellow Royal Society member Robert Boyle later published an account of how, using his air pump to remove the oxygen from a container, he could extinguish the bioluminescence emanating from rotting fish.56

  Ray finished writing the History of Fishes in February 1685 and on 25 March informed the Royal Society that the text was complete. It had been assumed that the Society’s printer, Mr Martyn, would publish the book, as with the Ornithology, but Martyn had just died so this was not an option. Dr John Fell, Bishop of Oxford, and Oxford University Press were approached and they agreed to publish it. Martin Lister, now living in London, was asked to take responsibility for the illustrations. Ray, having fulfilled his Willughby obligations and truly fed up with Emma and her husband, Josiah Child, dissociated himself from the publishing part of the process. He nonetheless suggested to the Royal Society that the expense of publishing might be offset by subscription, and failing that, perhaps Francis’s son, now Sir Francis Willoughby, who was just sixteen in the spring of 1685, might find the funds when he came of age. In the same letter Ray mentioned that he already had some of the images, including some from Willughby himself, as well as those culled from other publications. However, the idea that not all the fish images were to be Willughby originals caused consternation among members of the Royal Society. Robert Plot wrote to Francis Aston, who was then secretary and responsible for the Philosophical Transactions, expressing concern that ‘it had been presumed before, that Mr Willughby had taken all the draughts from … life, whereas it was now found, that the cuts [images] must be picked up here and there out of books’. Aston knew the power of high-quality, original illustrations for science and was worried that if some of the images in the fish book were not original, the entire exercise was at risk. It was for this reason that the Royal Society decided to oversee the production of Historia Piscium.57

  Illustrations of a John Dory (or St Peter’s Fish) Zeus faber for Willughby’s History of Fishes: on the left the original watercolour; on the right the published engraving (Ray 1686).

  Seeking subscriptions at a guinea a plate, the Royal Society found sponsors for all but thirty-three of the 187 plates. Seventy-four were covered by sixty-nine subscribers (many of them Fellows, including Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, John Evelyn and Martin Lister), and no fewer than eighty by the Society’s president, Samuel Pepys, who gave £50 initially and a further £13 later on. In response to Pepys’s generosity, Ray dedicated Historia Piscium to him, but also arranged for Pepys to receive a hand-coloured edition of the Ornithology.

  Unfortunately, the details of this gift are hazy. Although this coloured copy of the Ornithology bears both Samuel Pepys’s coat of arms and his bookplate, apparently affirming its authenticity, no correspondence between Ray or Pepys has been found that mentions what must have been a spectacular and expensive present. This exquisitely coloured edition – now in the Blacker-Wood Library at McGill University in Canada – is thought to have been thrown out from Pepys’s library after his death, as a ‘duplicate’, presumably by someone who hadn’t bothered to look inside it.58

  The fish book, notwithstanding its superb illustrations, was a financial disaster. It was too expensive; fish were less popular than birds; and political difficulties in the 1680s meant that people had more important things to worry about.59 The fact that the History of Fishes did not sell as well as hoped brought the Royal Society to the very brink of financial ruin and meant, among other things, they were unable to meet the cost of publishing Isaac Newton’s Principia. Fortunately, another Fellow, the wealthy astronomer Edmond Halley, came to their rescue.60

  The final book produced by Ray based on Willughby’s notes was about insects, Historia Insectorum, published in 1710 – five years after Ray’s death. Thirty-six years earlier, on 30 November 1674, and two years after Willughby had died, John Ray had written to Henry Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society, saying ‘The History of Insects is that wherein Mr Willughby did chiefly labour and most considerably advance; which yet for some reasons I reserve for the last.’ So even before the Latin edition of the Ornithology was published and before he had started on the History of Fishes, Ray knew that Willughby’s work on insects was to be the last of his friend’s books that he would bring to fruition.

  Why did Ray produce the volume on insects after the other two books? One reason, it has been suggested, was that he wanted to avoid competing with Martin Lister’s book Historia Animalium on snails and bivalves, published in 1678.61 It may seem implausible that books on insects and molluscs would overlap or compete, but in the 1600s the term ‘insect’ basically meant ‘invertebrate’ and included molluscs, as is nicely demonstrated by one of Lister’s own papers in the Philosophical Transactions of 1678, entitled ‘Tables of snails, together wit
h some queries relating to those insects’.62

  I am not convinced by the idea that Ray postponed the insect volume to appease Martin Lister. Even though both books deal with ‘insects’ their contents are completely distinct. Lister’s book is explicitly about molluscs, whereas Ray ignores these and focuses on other invertebrates – specifically worms, arachnids (spiders, ticks and scorpions), isopods (woodlice), as well as what he rather charmingly calls multipedes (meaning many legs: millipedes and centipedes) and, of course, insects proper.

  There is another reason for thinking that the delay with the insect book had nothing to do with Lister’s volume. Lister was well aware of the taxonomic extent and importance of Willughby’s invertebrate research and indeed had written to the Royal Society in February 1682 to say that it would be ‘a pity, that Mr Willughby’s curious and voluminous observations on insects, in which he greatly delighted, should be lost’.63

  The most likely cause, I think, for the delay, is that insects proved to be much more difficult to describe and classify than fishes, which in turn were more difficult than birds. Whatever the reason, Ray cannot have started on the insects until after the History of Fishes was completed in 1684. There remained a stumbling block, however, since Willughby’s notes were still held under lock and key by the irascible Josiah Child. The relations between Child and Ray’s Royal Society friends continued to thwart efforts to gain access to Willughby’s notes and specimens.

  Things changed, however, in 1687, when Sir Francis Willoughby, Francis Willughby’s son – the one who as a boy left home to live with his aunt – decided to move into Wollaton Hall, inviting his sister Cassandra to join him as housekeeper. Soon afterwards, they visited their old home at Middleton Hall ‘to see in what condition the books, etc (left there by my father) were’.64 This promising new chapter was thrown tragically off course when, after a brief illness, Sir Francis died the following year at the age of nineteen. Fortunately, his younger brother Thomas, to whom the baronetcy was transferred,65 assumed responsibility for the family, moved in to Wollaton with his sister, and continued his brother’s action against their mother’s husband.

  When Sir Thomas was still a boy, his stepfather Josiah Child had taken monies from the Middleton estate and invested them in the East India Company. Later, Child – again without any agreement from Sir Thomas – had allegedly sold timber from the Willoughby estate. And finally, Child refused to release capital that Sir Thomas needed to add lands to the estate. The case went to arbitration in 1689 and the amount owed to the Willoughbys was calculated – minus the amount that Child had spent maintaining Francis Willughby’s children.66 Once the case was settled the family was able to visit Middleton Hall and remove Francis Willughby’s collections and books as well as some furniture, plate and linen. The full extent of what they recovered is not known, but Willughby’s daughter Cassandra later commented on there being a collection of ‘novell remarkables’ (curiosities of some kinds), many books, and ‘a fine collection of valuable medals, and other rarities which my father had collected together of dried birds, fish, insects, shells, seeds, minerals and plants and other rarities’. As this implies, as well as the medals and coins that Willughby obtained from the Dursley hoard a decade earlier, the collection must also have included the cabinet containing the extensive collection of seeds, fossils and birds’ eggs, as well as Willughby’s insect notes and specimens.67

  Fortunately, we have a first-hand account of what the collection was like from James Petiver, who visited Wollaton for five days in the summer of 1691 as the guest of Sir Thomas and Cassandra. An apothecary, botanist and entomologist (his book on butterflies was one of the first), Petiver’s visit was part of a two-month-long ‘scientific peregrination’ that started at his home in Kendall and ended in London. Francis Willughby’s collection at Wollaton was one of the highlights of Petiver’s trip and, as he noted in his diary, it sent him into an ‘Extasie’:

  I had never seen such a Collection of Naturall Things before (here are the Globes, the Spheres.) here are Trophies both from the East and west Indies, as well of Sea as the Lands, in Short it is a well furnished Museum, there are a great deal of Strang: Animals, some whole, and some in part, there is a good Collection of Coynes, and Medalls, of sea-shells, of Birdsegge shells, and the best Collection of Insects in England.68

  A vast collection – and yet what remains (miraculously) in the seed cabinet today is clearly a fraction of what there once was.

  Prior to Petiver’s visit, and realising the significance of their father’s work, Sir Thomas and Cassandra had begun the massive task of organising and preserving the collection. They were lucky to have the help of Dr Thomas Man, a keen botanist who had been Sir Thomas’s tutor at Jesus College in Cambridge. Man also encouraged Sir Thomas’s interest in natural history, which developed to such an extent that in 1693 he was elected to the Royal Society, ‘unanimously chosen … for his own qualifications as on the account of the great honour that the Society and everybody of it bears to the memory of yr father’.69 It was undoubtedly Man’s influence that inspired Sir Thomas and Cassandra to consolidate Francis’s herbarium collection of plants – still in existence and currently housed at Nottingham University Library – assembled by their father when he and Ray had worked together. It must have been Thomas Man who encouraged Sir Thomas to collate and publish his father’s insect material since Man prepared some engravings for it. Thomas Man died in September 1690 and, like a butterfly that fails to break free from its chrysalis, the insect project came to an abrupt halt.

  In May 1691, John Ray wrote to Richard Waller, Secretary of the Royal Society, saying – somewhat mysteriously – that although he had seen Francis Willughby’s insect materials, he had long since given them to Sir Thomas, ‘who will I suppose in time take care to publish them’.70 This suggests first, that Ray viewed his own History of Insects as an independent project, and second, that Willughby’s entomology book, thanks to Man and Sir Thomas, was close to reaching a publishable form. Yet ten years later it was still unpublished, and for some unknown reason the manuscript was by then at the Royal Society. In 1704, Ray was able to borrow it and began to incorporate some of its contents into his own book on which he was now working in earnest.

  In his late seventies, this was an extremely difficult time for Ray, who was suffering from incurable suppurating ulcers on his legs. In 1700 he had written to Hans Sloane, Secretary of the Royal Society, telling him that he had ‘little or no absolute intermission of pain’. Three months later he wrote again: ‘I am now much worse, being by the sharpness of my pains reduced to that weakness that I can scarcely stand alone, so that I lay aside all thoughts of the History of Insects and despair even of life itself.’ It may be no coincidence that he felt the cause of his ulcers to be invisible insects whose nests lay in the tumors in his legs. It is a measure of his fortitude, or perhaps the absolute need for some kind of distraction, that he persevered so assiduously with the insect project. It is clear, too, that even as his body fell painfully apart, Ray’s mind remained as sharply focused as ever.71

  The objective of the History of Insects was the same as the Ornithology and the History of Fishes: species descriptions, identification and classification. There was an important difference from the previous volumes, however, and one that marks Francis Willughby’s contribution to entomology as especially novel. This was his interest in insect generation – reproduction and development – and, in particular, the metamorphosis from larva to adult. The presence or absence of metamorphosis was the crucial criterion in Willughby’s classificatory system, and Ray made it the foundation of the classification in Historia Insectorum.

  After Ray died, in January 1705, with the text still unfinished, it was hoped that his friend Samuel Dale would complete the manuscript for publication, but for whatever reason he failed to do so. The manuscript was then given to another of Ray’s friends, William Derham, who in turn did nothing either, eventually passing the papers to Hans Sloane at the Royal Soci
ety in 1708. Even there, the manuscript’s fate was uncertain. Tancred Robinson, physician and naturalist and Fellow of the Royal Society, one of many who had played an important role in seeing the History of Fishes through to publication twenty years previously, commented to Martin Lister that Ray’s papers ‘lye in Dr Sloane’s hands, and when they will see a resurrection I cannot divine’.72 In 1709 a Royal Society committee took control, deciding that even though the manuscript was incomplete and devoid of any images, it should be printed. When they duly arranged for its publication, Derham, who knew of the manuscript’s convoluted history, suggested to the committee that they should delay publication until they had consulted Sir Thomas Willoughby, but Derham was overruled. The History of Insects appeared in 1710 with Ray’s name as the sole author, a decision, it seems, made by the Royal Society committee, rather than by Ray before he died.

  Shortly after the book appeared in print, William Derham met Emma Child and her daughter Cassandra, who told him in no uncertain terms that they and Sir Thomas ‘took it ill’ that Francis Willughby’s insect papers were published solely under Ray’s name. Emma said also that they considered it ‘surreptitious’ that the book had been published without their knowledge, pointing out that Sir Thomas and Dr Man had spent nearly two years on the project and had prepared numerous plates ‘wch are now lying by them’.73 In an attempt to smooth things over, Derham suggested that a new edition might be produced that included Willughby’s illustrations. It didn’t happen and the prepared plates, like the original Willughby manuscript, subsequently disappeared. The hope now is that they may be lying in someone’s attic or hidden away in a library and will eventually be rediscovered.