The Wonderful Mr Willughby

by Tim Birkhead

  Bizarrely, both brothers’ books included a critical overview of the ornithological literature. With what authority one wonders? At such a young age, however well tutored and educated, they simply didn’t have the experience (even though today few would disagree with their evaluations). Their assessment of past bird books is horribly polarised, with authors classed either as useless or brilliant. And Willughby, of course, is brilliant.9

  The Woods’ decision to single out Willughby as the champion of bird studies was clearly based on their naive (and unreciprocated) hero-worship for William Swainson, who at that time was Britain’s top bird man. Charles Wood wrote: ‘Not only has Willughby been defrauded of his due with regard to the work [the Ornithology], but also the names given by him have been ascribed to more modern authors.’10 And in a similar adversarial vein Neville commented, ‘the amiable Ray, whatever he might be in botany, had very little merit as an ornithologist, the whole of his system … being the production of his friend Willughby; as is frankly acknowledged by Ray himself, and must therefore be true.’11

  The onslaught was maintained by another eminent ornithologist, William Jardine, who in a long-winded and adulatory memoir wrote (after forty-three pages of preamble): ‘It is now the place … to submit to the reader’s attention the chief particulars in the history of the English Naturalist, Francis Willughby, Esq. of whom, although his name occurs in almost every treatise on Natural History, and often with high commendation, yet no Memoir has been published calculated to illustrate varied excellencies of his character, or to do justice to the genuine claims of his improvements in science.’12 Jardine repeats and reinforces the views espoused by William Swainson and Charles and Neville Wood, as though all of them were independent authorities on Willughby.

  More balanced was Alfred Newton in his history of ornithology – which appears as a mere 72,000-word Introduction to his Dictionary of Birds – a book that one reviewer described as ‘the best book ever written on birds’. In it he states that Willughby, ‘who at first the other’s pupil, seems gradually to have become the master’.13

  It is hardly surprising that there would be a backlash.

  It came in the 1940s from Canon Charles Raven, theologian and master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in his wonderful and scholarly biography of John Ray. As a birdwatcher, botanist and entomologist guided by God, Raven, it seems to me, imagined himself almost as a reincarnation of Ray, determined to reassert and secure his reputation. Raven tells us that he ‘collected nearly all the plants, birds and insects Ray records, and often in the same localities; and the thing that he tried to do, to reinterpret the faith of a Christian in the light of sound knowledge of nature, has been my continuous and chief concern.’14

  Raven’s densely packed book is a comprehensive account of Ray’s life and work, but it is also designed to counter the view of Willughby as the hero. Raven is courteous but relentless in his defence of John Ray. He starts with four ‘indisputable facts’, which, briefly, are as follows: Ray’s university record makes it clear he was a genius, ‘in the Galtonian sense’ (meaning, a natural genius?); Ray was responsible for collections made abroad, for observations on birds and fishes and the independent study of birds, fish and insects; he was ‘scrupulously punctilious … in acknowledging … others’; and finally, he ‘wrote with enthusiasm of all his friends’, never uttering a word of criticism, adding: ‘We could never gather from his letters that Lister was one of the most self-satisfied and obstinate of men, or that Sloane was a snob and a dilettante.’15 These facts may indeed be indisputable, but they hardly inform the argument about the relative merits of Willughby and Ray since much the same could be said of Francis Willughby.

  In what he seems to have set up as a kind of academic beauty contest, Raven then enumerates five points about Willughby. These are that: (i) he was ‘a man of high principles, great fertility of mind and energy of disposition, keen, interested, enthusiastic’ and in ‘the language of the time a “virtuoso”’; (ii) he ‘left very little original work’; (iii) he had a ‘real gift for speculative ideas, which Ray did not always think sound or probable’; (iv) he ‘contributed almost nothing to Ray’s botanical work except in sharing in the experiments on the flow of sap’; and (v) his best work was on insects, which ‘shows keenness, ability and a wide range of observations, but is elementary as compared with the best of Ray’s work’.16

  Throughout his book Raven never misses an opportunity to snipe at Willughby and is relentless in grinding down any opposition to Ray. At one point he says ‘compared to Willughby, Ray has a clearer grasp of scientific method and a truer insight into the principles of natural history’.17

  In his triumphant summing-up, Raven declares Willughby to have had ‘less knowledge, patience and judgment’ than Ray, and ‘the evidence makes it certain that Ray was a scientist of genius and probable that Willughby was a brilliantly talented amateur’.18 Touché. Job done: the ornithologist routed.

  Charles Raven’s elegant, wordy and adulatory account of Ray’s life left readers in little doubt where the real talent lay in the joint Willughby-Ray enterprise: a view that remained unchallenged for over fifty years. Now, in the light of more recent research and new discoveries, we are better placed to assess Willughby’s contribution. Although Raven was motivated by an enormous sense of injustice to Ray, he is correct in assuming Ray to be a genius, but too harsh in demoting Willughby to the rank of ‘enthusiastic amateur’. In the strict sense of the word, Willughby was an amateur in that he had never held an academic position, as Ray had. That is why Willughby is sometimes described as a ‘virtuoso’. We would probably make the same distinction today, albeit without using the term. But Raven’s wording is inappropriate. His comment that Willughby’s entomological work was ‘elementary’ compared with the best (my italics) work of Ray is blatantly unfair because it does not allow for Willughby’s early death. Raven is also wrong – as we have seen – to say that Willughby contributed almost nothing to Ray’s botanical studies. Indeed, as we now know, it was Willughby who initiated the studies of the flow of sap.

  We can excuse Raven, to some extent, on the grounds that he knew much less than we do today about the depth and breadth of Willughby’s abilities, but in the broad context of the history of science this game of spot-the-genius is inappropriate and unhelpful. What is more obvious than ever now is that Willughby and Ray worked as a team. They had a synergistic effect on each other and it is unlikely that in terms of their zoological efforts either would have been as effective on their own. As it was, they transformed the study of zoology in general, and birds in particular. Theirs was the first true classification; they set a new standard in observation and description, and their encyclopaedia formed the foundation on which all subsequent ornithology was built.

  In 1909 the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald published a perceptive account on the psychology of scientists, whose extreme types he calls ‘romantics’ and ‘classics’. The romantic’s peculiarity, he said, ‘lies not so much in the perfection of each individual work as in the variety and striking originality of numerous works following one another in rapid succession, and in the direct and powerful influence he has upon his contemporaries’. The sure-fire way to identify the classic, on the other hand, he says, is ‘the all-round perfection of each of his works … and … need to stand unblemished in the public eye’. Ostwald finishes his description by saying ‘the speed of mental reaction is a decisive criterion for determining to which type a scientist belongs. Discoverers with rapid reactivity are romantics, those with slower reactions are classics.’19

  This is remarkable, for it is almost as if Ostwald had the curricula vitae of Willughby and Ray in front of him: Willughby with his swift succession of interests in birds, fish, insects, seeds, sap, games, mathematics and linguistics; Ray with his perfectionist’s eye for detail, and the tenacity and endurance to bring to fruition whatever they started together.

  It is now agreed that there is no single way of doing
science and that both of Ostwald’s types are equally important in driving progress; and, of course, these are the extremes. Most scientists exhibit some of both traits and lie towards the centre of that particular continuum.20 The secret of Willughby and Ray’s success, however, resulted from their collaboration and the synergism borne out of their respective talents and contrasting personality types. In his eulogy to his friend in the Ornithology, Ray lists those features he identifies as Willughby’s characteristic marks: ‘quick apprehension, piercing wit and sound judgement … and his great industry’.

  I have been living with Francis Willughby for almost a decade, trying to imagine – on the basis of frustratingly slim evidence – what it was like to pioneer a new way of viewing the natural world. Exhilarating for Willughby, but also for myself as I came to understand him better. The more I read and the more I talked about him with my colleagues, the more I liked Willughby. He was fragile too, but constantly straining at the leash, never still, aware of how much there was to do and how little time he had, regardless of his health. But the more I thought about Francis, the more I felt that – notwithstanding the adulatory eulogy in the Ornithology – there was something a bit unsettling about the way in which Ray presents Willughby to the world.

  The Ornithology, we are told by Ray, and we know from much other evidence, was a joint effort, based on Willughby’s notes and Ray’s organisational and literary skills. But just consider – outside that effusive Preface – how often Ray says ‘we’ compared with how often he refers to himself: ‘I’. If this was a true partnership and if Ray was genuinely trying to ensure his friend’s reputation, surely he should have been using ‘we’ throughout, but he doesn’t. Moreover, he sometimes contradicts his colleague; ‘Willughby found this’, but ‘I found this’, he says. Consider also Ray’s response to Willughby’s novel questions about birds: Ray is dismissive, almost indifferent. He certainly does not use the queries to bolster Willughby’s reputation. He doesn’t say, for example, ‘look at these ingenious questions that might inform or inspire future generations of ornithologists’. Consider also their classifications: Ray refers to Willughby’s as ‘a method of his own contriving’. And finally, throughout the Ornithology, Ray grumbles about Willughby’s unnecessarily detailed descriptions of plumage.

  One explanation is that Ray is simply being honest: that was the ways things were. But it isn’t how you’d expect someone to celebrate the life of a prematurely dead friend. Ray’s feelings towards Willughby may have partly been because he was exhausted by the work he had to do to prepare the Ornithology, which he says was more than he would willingly have undertaken.

  Another possibility is that Ray is merely setting out his own stall – he had, after all, his own future and livelihood to think about. He wanted to become an authority on the natural world.

  These niggles are neither unreasonable nor unrealistic, for great friendships and marriages often survive and thrive despite minor irritations, like the bramble thorn that leaves its tiny tip embedded beneath the skin of one’s hand.

  History tends to celebrate those who make discoveries that change the world: the laws of gravity, natural selection, penicillin and the structure of DNA. Willughby and Ray changed the world, but without making any single major discovery. What they did do, and it was just as valuable, was to create through their schemes of classification and scholarship a way of studying the natural world.

  One way to evaluate Willughby’s ornithological success is to compare what he and Ray identified and described with what we know today. They did pretty well, identifying and describing around 90 per cent of the roughly 200 birds regularly (if not always commonly) encountered in England and Wales (where they travelled). They missed several warblers, the firecrest, the pied flycatcher and the bearded tit, and struggled to distinguish different gulls and waders. They also overlooked Montagu’s harrier, Bewick’s swan and the Slavonian grebe, while neither the storm petrel nor the fulmar (which in the seventeenth century was probably confined to St Kilda) are mentioned in the Ornithology. Two species that I was surprised they got were the snow bunting, referred to as ‘the great pied mountain finch or lesser brambling’, shot by Willughby in Lincolnshire one winter, and the secretive, visually non-descriptive grasshopper warbler: ‘A titlark that sings like a grasshopper.’21

  Perhaps not surprisingly, Willughby and Ray were rather less successful with continental birds, identifying only about half of the seventy additional species they could potentially have encountered on their travels. Notable omissions include the booted, Bonelli’s and short-toed eagles and the black kite, several terns (notoriously difficult), middle-spotted and three-toed woodpeckers, the scops owl and the pin-tailed sandgrouse. Successes included the citril finch – the verzellino – discovered (as a cage bird) by Ray in Rome in 1664, and the spotted crake that Willughby found and described in a Valencia market while apart from Ray and his colleagues.

  Willughby and Ray were probably the first to describe the common scoter, Manx shearwater, crested pochard, red grouse, spotted crake and honey-buzzard. Ray obtained a specimen of the common scoter – a difficult-to-observe duck that spends almost all its time on the sea – at Chester while he and Willughby were staying with their friend, Bishop Wilkins, in 1671. Despite their having received a scoter from Francis Jessop a few years previously, Ray claims this one for himself, stating in the Ornithology: ‘I found the male of this kind at Chester, killed on the sea-coasts thereabouts, and bought in the market by my Lord Bishop Wilkins … this bird hath not as yet been described by any author in extant print that we know of.’22

  The Manx shearwater (or Manx puffin as it was then known), seen by Willughby during their visit to the Calf of Man in 1662, barely counts as a discovery because the bird that Francis described was a chick – little more than a ball of fluff. It was only later that Ray saw dried specimens of the adult bird at the Royal Society’s repository and in John Tradescant’s famous cabinet at Lambeth, when he was able to describe it properly – but even then he failed to recognise it as the same species that Thomas Browne had maintained in captivity.

  The great red-headed duck – the red-crested pochard – was Ray’s discovery entirely: he found it in the market in Rome when Willughby was elsewhere in Italy: ‘I never happened to see it elsewhere, neither do I find any description of it, or so much as any mention made of it in any book. Where it lives and breeds I know not.’23

  Willughby’s spotted crake, also – sadly – doesn’t count because there is no firm evidence that he recognised it as distinct: that is, specifically distinct from the bird later known as Baillon’s crake, which he and Ray had seen and described in Italy.24

  When it comes to the honey-buzzard we are on firmer ground. We do not know for sure, but I suspect it was Willughby who made the discovery. It was his obsession with detail that would have enabled him to see that the bird he had in front of him was new and had not previously been described.

  There are many groups of bird species whose outward appearance makes them difficult to distinguish: certain warblers, harriers, wading birds (especially outside the breeding season), pipits, marsh and willow tits, the Eurasian tree creeper and short-toed tree creeper, and so on. Raptors were especially difficult because they exhibit a huge amount of individual variation in their plumage colour.25 The common buzzard, for example, varies from being almost completely white to pure chocolate brown, with everything in between. In this respect it is all the more remarkable that Willughby should notice a different sort of buzzard. The published account, obviously written by Ray, finishes in a characteristically modest and understated way: ‘It hath not as yet (that we know of) been described by any Writer.’ They knew it was new.26

  All of Willughby’s diagnostic characters of the honey-buzzard are absolutely correct, but he seems to have overlooked (or Ray overlooked when writing up the account) what is now considered one of the most interesting, if not the most obvious, features of that species: the curious, scale-like feather
s on the face. The honey-buzzard’s principal prey is the larvae of social wasps, which it finds by following the flight-lines of adult wasps as they return to their nest. The bird then alights on the ground and digs out the nest using its short strong legs and claws. Adult wasps, as everyone knows, are ferocious in the defence of their nest, but the honey-buzzard’s distinctive face-feathers have evolved to protect it from the stings. Willughby and Ray knew that the honey-buzzard preys on wasps’ nests for they found fragments of them in a honey-buzzard nest they examined.

  There’s something rather comforting about the honey-buzzard’s name, conjuring up, as it does, images of a bird with warm and mellow plumage, or of one that instead of feasting on live prey, ingests the pure and natural sweetness of the bees’ selfless labours. But this is wrong, for the honey-buzzard neither seeks nor eats honey in the wild.

  It seems likely that the name was one given by local people, and Willughby and Ray intimate as much in the Ornithology, based on the erroneous but widespread assumption that wasps, like bees, create and store honey.

  The idea that Willughby had discovered the honey-buzzard was later challenged by Alfred Newton, the pompous, blustering, misogynistic doyen of Victorian ornithology. His fame rests on his Dictionary, helping to found the British Ornithologists’ Union, encouraging young ornithologists and being an undoubted scholar. He accumulated an impressive library (still extant) and he knew his books inside out. It is a measure of the man that he annotated many of his books, correcting the author’s grammar, punctuation or statements of fact. He considered himself the expert on all things ornithological.

  Under the heading ‘honey-buzzard’ in his Dictionary of Birds, Newton says that this was a bird Willughby ‘thought he was describing for the first time; but herein he was wrong, for it was the Boudree of Belon (1555)’.27