The Wonderful Mr Willughby
Page 27
The lengthy introduction that also serves as a comprehensive list of contents to the History of Insects – what Ray entitled the Prolegomena – provides us not only with a sense of what’s in store but also the scale of the task that Willughby had set himself. There are currently thought to be between one and three million species of insects in the world, of which only a third have been described; there are over 20,000 species of insect in Britain alone.74 Even though many fewer were recognised in Willughby’s day, the number was far in excess of the known number of birds or fishes. An additional difficulty was that, in contrast to birds and fishes, most insects (and indeed, most invertebrates) had no names. Willughby and Ray deal with this by using ‘polynomials’ or what I have called descriptors: short phrases such as ‘A large long-horned Beetle, with big horns, jointed and bent back’; ‘A water-beetle with ridged or channelled elytra’; ‘An elegant Crane fly, with black back and elytra, a cross-shaped belly, with wings marked with a dark spot, light and gleaming’.
Insects had no names partly because people were – up to this point – much less interested in them than they were in birds. Birds were familiar and useful; they were caught and kept for their song, or killed and cooked, or taken as a cure. Because different bird species were used for different purposes they had been allocated names to distinguish them. Birds – and fish, for similar reasons – were therefore far ahead of insects in terms of possessing common names. Confusion persisted whenever the same bird was known by different names in different parts of the country, but overall, as the Ornithology makes clear, all British birds possessed a common name. In contrast, only a handful of species in the History of Insects had a common name.
The different ways in which Willughby and Ray treated birds, fish and insects in their three volumes reflect the way they viewed the animal (and plant kingdoms) as a whole. This isn’t explicit in the Ornithology, History of Fishes or History of Insects, but Ray spells it out in his book The Wisdom of God, written during the late 1680s – perhaps before he even started on the insect work. He refers to a ‘scale of perfection’ that, in descending order, runs from beasts (quadrupeds) to birds, fishes, insects and plants. Beasts are more perfect than birds, which in turn are more perfect than fish, and so on.
Ray may have borrowed this idea of a scale of perfection from his friend John Wilkins, who wrote:
It may be observed to be amongst these [i.e. fishes, birds and beasts] … that the more perfect kinds are the least numerous. Upon which account, insects being the most minute and imperfect, and some of them (perhaps) of a spontaneous generation, are of the greatest variety, tho by reason of their littleness, the several species of them, have not hitherto been sufficiently enumerated or described, by those Authors who have particularly applyed themselves to this study.75
Although based on the medieval notion of ‘the great chain of being’ – a hierarchy of life forms decreed by God – Ray’s interpretation of the scale of perfection is remarkably free of religious connotations and simply reflects the number of species, their size and their distinctiveness. There are more birds than there are beasts, more fish than birds, and more insects than fish. Based on his friend Martin Lister’s reckoning, Ray presumed that there were at least 1,800 to 2,000 species of insects, which he says ‘for numbers [may] vie even with Plants themselves’. By comparison, Willughby and Ray thought there might be around 500 species of birds.76
The scale of perfection also reflects size, with beasts being generally bigger than birds, and so on. Indeed, as Ray points out, many insects (meaning little animals, in general) are so small they can be seen only by using a microscope, as shown by ‘Mr. Lewenhoek of Delft in Holland … whose Observations were confirmed and improved by our Learned and Worthy Country-man Mr. Robert Hook.’77 Finally, the less perfect the organism, the less distinct it is from other organisms of the same type.
The degree of ‘perfection’, the number of species and their size (in particular the small size of many insects) all conspired to make each level on the scale less tractable and less familiar than the one above it. Distinguishing different insect species was much more difficult than it was for fish, or birds or beasts, which in turn meant that it was also much more difficult to assign them common names. Even so, Willughby and Ray’s use of ‘descriptors’ was an advance over previous efforts, including their own. When they produced a classification of insects for John Wilkins’s Essay in the 1660s, they limited themselves to categories, such as ‘dragonfly’, without attempting to distinguish different species. The use of descriptors in the History of Insects was an important step in the great chain of scientific progress, and it was crucial in allowing Linnaeus to create his binomial system of scientific nomenclature in the mid-1700s.
Inspired by Willughby and Ray’s work, entomology became an increasingly popular topic for investigation, and it was James Petiver who began the process of assigning common names to insects. Beginning with butterflies and moths, Petiver granted them names such as lappet, prominent, tussock, fritillary, argus and admiral (which later became red admiral) in his book Papilionum Britanniae Icones, published in 1718.78
The insect volume contains a tantalising section on ‘The poison of Spiders’ that is relevant to ornithology. Ray, who had suffered from an irrational fear of spiders since childhood, tells us that those in England are neither ‘very injurious or dangerous, but they are not absolutely without poison’. He then cites an experiment conducted by ‘our most distinguished Harvey [William Harvey]’, who pierced his hand with a needle, and then after rubbing the point of the needle on the jaws of a spider, pricked himself again. Unable to feel any difference between the two points, he nevertheless noticed that the one with the spider venom ‘was soon covered with redness, heat and inflammation, as if it were girding itself up for a fight and the storming of a harmful ill’. Ray goes on to speculate about how animals cope when they ingest venomous spiders, citing the work of the Italian physician Francis Redi, who stated that ‘In the stomach however the juices with which it [the venom] is mixed lessen its power, & weaken it: and that mucus by which the lining of the stomach is covered within blocks its way so that it does not touch or injure it at all.’ Ray then says something that seems to contradict my impression of how he and Willughby worked: ‘For most small birds they [spiders] are a delicacy: for they seize all types of spiders indiscriminately and for the sake of observing this I have reared small birds in cages.’ Earlier, I suggested that their lack of observations of cage birds had restricted Willughby and Ray’s ornithological horizon, but here is Ray saying that he, at least, reared birds in cages in order to conduct experiments. Perhaps he did this while working on the insect book, long after Willughby’s death. Anyway, he is correct that many insectivorous birds eat spiders, and several of them, including great tits, blue tits, and pied and red-breasted flycatchers, we now know selectively feed their five- to six-day-old nestlings on spiders, suggesting that at this particular stage of development their chicks require some specific nutrients best provided by spiders.79
The History of Insects appeared only in Latin. Ray’s successors recognised it as a valuable contribution to entomology, and Linnaeus identified Ray and (with typical immodesty) himself as the best describers of insects. As Brian Ogilvie has said: ‘Though much in the Historia Insectorum is Ray’s, Willughby deserves recognition as one of the outstanding proto-entomological practitioners of the seventeenth century.’80
We don’t know how many copies of the insect book were published, nor how the general public greeted it. I imagine its reception to have been cool, for even knowing of its historical significance today, with no illustrations the book seems relatively unattractive. There could have been illustrations had the Royal Society worked more closely with Sir Thomas Willoughby and used the images created by Thomas Man. But following its very long gestation the Society was desperate to see the book published and anxious to avoid the kind of debt that the fish illustrations had incurred. A single set of tiny ink and was
h images of bees and wasps, probably from Thomas Man, survives, escapees from the protracted and perilous journey endured by Willughby’s other insect materials. Those images give a sense of what the book might have looked like: attractive, but not in the same league as the fishes, nor of the insect illustrations in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia of 1665.
The only surviving drawings of insects prepared either by Francis Willughby’s son, Thomas, or by Dr Thomas Man.
In the early 1800s William Kirby – known as the father of insect studies – appreciated the History of Insects and, recognising the important contributions made by both Willughby and Ray, cited them together with Martin Lister as ‘stars of the first magnitude and the brightest lustre’, diffusing ‘new light over every department of natural history’. Kirby also acknowledged Willughby’s perceptive observations on leaf-cutter bees, and took Linnaeus to task for not reading the History of Insects carefully enough with regard to bees. It was Kirby who called the leaf-cutter bee – whose larvae Willughby had reared – with punnish humour the ‘willow bee’ Apis willughbiella, thus commemorating Willughby’s entomological eminence.81
The fact that biologists today are less familiar with either Willughby the ichthyologist or entomologist than they are with Willughby the ornithologist is not simply due to the diminished perfection of fish and insects, or the lack of English translations of those works. It is largely because the originality of Willughby and Ray’s approach in the study of natural history lay in the Ornithology. The Fishes and Insects volumes contain much less first-hand material, and the information within those two books is often presented in a rather tedious, formulaic manner – certainly in the Fishes. As his biographer Charles Raven has said, Ray’s heart wasn’t really in the fish book: he did it out of a sense of duty to his friend.82 For the Fishes book, too many cooks spoiled the bouillabaisse: there were simply too many authors and production managers to create a suitably digestible dish. And if Ray’s heart wasn’t in the fishes, it certainly wasn’t in the insects. Worn out with age and the excruciating pain from his ulcerated legs, he ploughed on to the bitter end to ensure that he did justice to his friend’s endeavours.
Birds had led the way, and it was inevitable therefore that the books on fishes and insects would seem less novel. They were both still a considerable achievement, full of valuable information, and each a landmark publication in the study of those two animal groups, but they lacked the iridescent sparkle of the Ornithology.
10
A Sustained Finale: Willughby’s Buzzard Takes Flight
Francis Willughby would have been thrilled by the knowledge that his curiosity, industry and innovation were immortalised in the names of a fish, a bee and an entire genus of exotic plants. I doubt whether the absence of a bird from this list would have worried him unduly, for I am sure that he viewed his efforts across the animal and plant kingdoms as fairly even, even if we don’t. He was, after all, interested in all aspects of the natural world.
The names Willughby’s charr, Willughby’s bee and the plant genus Willughbeyi were ascribed by later experts in those taxonomic groups. These were people interested in the history of their subject and with some certainty of knowledge regarding Francis Willughby’s contributions, not only to that particular area of natural history, but to the entire field.
Some scientists, artists, writers and musicians gain their reputation while they are alive, and that reputation may subsequently grow, be sustained or, as in the case of the biologist Paul Kammerer or the art critic John Ruskin, decline. In other cases, reputations are made only in retrospect when the full extent and significance of someone’s achievements are revealed.
Francis Willughby’s reputation is unusual in the way it has fluctuated over time. Certainly, he was well respected by Royal Society contemporaries during his lifetime, but he was just one of several clever ‘new philosophers’. His early death surprised and dismayed his colleagues, and forced them to make an assessment. They knew he was good, but apart from his few letters in the Society’s Transactions there was rather little hard evidence of Willughby’s talents. Instead, they had to defer judgement until John Ray had pulled together and published Willughby’s works.
The Ornithology, appearing just four years after Francis’s death, while memories of him were still strong, did much to consolidate his reputation, not least because of the eulogy that John Ray included in the Preface. No one knew Willughby like John Ray. His assessment of him was undoubtedly coloured by his sense of loss and by his commitment to the Willughby family, to whom he was dedicated, but also on whom he was dependent. Nonetheless, Ray’s appraisal of his friend’s personality and abilities was probably very honest. Certainly, no one during Ray’s lifetime wrote anything to the contrary.
The three decades it took Ray to complete his friend’s works both contributed to and detracted from Willughby’s reputation. Ray’s own stature resulting from his numerous published works such as the Wisdom of God was continuing to rise, while the public memory of Francis Willughby as the author of the History of Fishes, and of the History of Insects where he wasn’t even identified as an author, was, in some quarters at least, beginning to wane.
The family took rather longer to appreciate Francis’s achievements. Initially, this was because of Emma and Josiah Child’s messy marriage and their even messier relationships with Francis’s and Emma’s children, Francis junior, Thomas and Cassandra. It was only after the children had grown up and freed themselves from Child’s selfish and puerile ways that they began to understand and value what their father had accomplished during his brief life, and started to preserve what was left of his papers and collections.
Throughout the eighteenth century, naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus, Thomas Pennant, the Comte de Buffon and Gilbert White all continued to applaud and cite Willughby with regard to both the Ornithology and the Fishes. Indeed, it is hard to find a natural history book from that period that doesn’t mention him – and in glowing terms. Francis Willughby was the natural history authority. But, in 1788, after purchasing Linnaeus’s collections and founding the London-based Linnaean Society, the botanist Sir James Edward Smith redirected the spotlight away from Willughby and onto John Ray. In his introductory address to the new Society entitled the ‘Rise and Progress of Natural History’, Smith stated:
These illustrious friends [Willughby and Ray] labored together with uncommon ardour in the study of nature, and left scarcely any of her tribes unexplored. But death, which so often disappoints the fairest hopes, cut off the former in the prime of life, before he had digested the materials to the acquisition of which he had devoted his youth; and they might well have been lost to the world and his name have perished with them, but for the faithful friendship and truly scientific ardour of Ray.1
He continues:
So close was the intercourse between these two naturalists, that it is not easy to assign each his due share of merit. Indeed, Ray has been so partial to the fame of his departed friend, and has cherished his memory with such affectionate care, that we are in danger of attributing too much to Mr Willoughby [sic], and too little to himself.2
In response to Smith’s pronouncement, ‘The ornithologists rose in wrath to denounce this impertinent botanist and defend their patron saint.’3
The first to come to Willughby’s defence was William Swainson, whose father John had been one of the original members of the Linnaean Society. In 1834, some six years after Smith’s death, Swainson, who had a reputation for being fractious, published a 460-page book entitled A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural History in what seems to me to be an attempt to usurp Smith’s earlier account. In it, Swainson declares Willughby to be ‘the most accomplished zoologist of this or any other country; for all the honour that has been given to Ray, so far as concerns systematic zoology, belongs exclusively to him. He alone is the author of that system which both Ray and Linnaeus took for their guide, which was not improved by the former or confessed by the latter.’4
To ram home his case, Swainson continues:
It has been customary for writers to represent Willughby more as a wealthy and intelligent amateur than as an original thinker; as the disciple and pupil of Ray in zoological pursuits rather than his master and instructor …
But for the patronage and protection of Willughby, he [Ray] might probably have done little or nothing in science; and had he not been the editor of his patron’s works, his name as a zoologist, would have been far inferior to that of Lister, for he had neither the talents of the first, or the originality of the last: yet he labored conjointly with both, and his name assumes a superiority from the variety of subjects he wrote upon, and from the number of works which bear his name, either as author or editor.5
Swainson’s final flourish is to say that Ray ‘cannot be said to have possessed great genius’, a statement he moderates somewhat by adding that he had ‘sound judgment, great zeal, unwearied application; – a pious, amiable and benevolent spirit, ever ready to acknowledge and praise the labours of others.’6
Two very ardent and uncritical disciples of Swainson were Neville and Charles Wood, precocious brothers from an eccentric, utopian socialist family. With misplaced aspirations to ornithological greatness, they each – at the tender age of eighteen – produced a book on birds, only months apart. And what curious books they are, not least because – out of undoubted competition – they hardly mention each other.7
And what a hodge-podge of ornithology! In a well-intentioned effort to make birds’ common names more logical, they suggested some sweeping changes. They weren’t alone: tinkering with the names of birds was rather like a parlour game. Perversely, however, what the Woods proposed was often anything but logical and rarely an improvement. Among other things, they suggested changing the name of the common blackbird to the ‘garden ouzel’ and the continental race of the yellow wagtail to the ‘blue-headed oatear’.8