The Wonderful Mr Willughby

by Tim Birkhead

  34Feingold (1990: 12).

  35Serjeantson (2016).

  36From a Latin poem by James Duport addressed to Willughby (Duport 1676: 316), translated by Philip Oswald (Birkhead 2016a).

  37Raven (1942: 51–2).

  38Serjeantson (2016).

  CHAPTER 2: JOHN RAY AND THE CUNNING CRAFTSMANSHIP OF NATURE

  1Raven (1942: 62) in his authoritative biography of John Ray states that there are just three portraits ‘from life’ of John Ray: 1. A young, forty-ish Ray without a wig, an oil painting thought to have been executed around 1667 and attributed to Mary Beale (Natural History Museum, London). 2. Ray in his sixties – the best-known oil portrait and by an unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London). 3. Ray in his sixties, chalk and graphite from around 1691 by William Faithorne (Department of Prints, British Museum). Jardine (2003), in her biography of Robert Hooke, dismissed the idea that portrait 1 was of Ray, suggesting instead that this is Robert Hooke. Jensen (2004) in turn dismissed this, proposing instead that the portrait is of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579–1644). The key piece of evidence in support of this is a line drawing of Van Helmont in his own book published in 1644. The similarity to the oil painting (portrait 1) is so strong it appears that Mary Beale constructed her painting from the drawing. The weight of evidence, then, is that portrait 1 is not Ray. Nonetheless, it is intriguing that Raven, who was obsessed by Ray, should accept that portrait 1 was of his subject, as did Sawyer (1963).

  2Feingold (1990: 2).

  3Raven (1942: 27).

  4Wardhaugh (2016).

  5Mynott (2018).

  6Calloway (2014: 98); Raven (1942: 37).

  7Ogilvie (2016a).

  8B. W. Ogilvie, pers. comm. (10 November 2015).

  9Ray (1691).

  10Ibid., xiii.

  11I erroneously ascribed this idea to John Ray (Birkhead 2008), but later found that the idea had come from Robert Boyle – see Ray, The Wisdom of God (1735: 122; 10th edition). Lack (1966) studied the timing of birds’ breeding seasons and showed it to be true.

  12Wootton (2015).

  13Raven (1942: 81). McMahon (2000) suggests that Ray’s mental illness was caused by distress at the Civil War.

  14Raven (1942: 82).

  15C. D. Preston, pers. comm.

  16Oswald and Preston (2011).

  17Ibid.

  18Raven (1942: 47–8); Feingold (1990: 34).

  19Raven (1942: 313).

  20Ornithology, 282.

  21Ibid.

  22Baldner (1653); see facsimile, Baldner (1973); MacGillivray (1852).

  23Feingold (1990: 35).

  24Roos (2016).

  25Lemery (1675).

  26Bynum (2008).

  27Derham (1718: 357–8).

  28https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_garden.

  29So wrote William Holder in 1678. In that same year a certain John Wallis claimed 1645 to be the year of the Society’s foundation, but as John Gribbin has pointed out in The Fellowship (2005), the dispute about the date arose because Wallis dishonestly took credit for some of Holder’s scientific findings and in the ensuing battle contradicted all that Holder had said, including the date on which the Royal Society began.

  30Gribbin (2006: 125–9).

  31Jardine (1843).

  32Johnston (2016).

  33Ornithology, Preface, 1.

  34Ibid.

  35Ibid., 2.

  36Wood (1958: 107–11).

  CHAPTER 3: A MOMENTOUS DECISION

  1Burnet (1833).

  2Gribbin (2006: 133).

  3Hooke (1665), Preface to Micrographia.

  4Ogilvie (2016b).

  5The Royal Society’s repository: see Hunter (1995).

  6Ornithology, 334, and plate 78.

  7Both Keynes (1964) and Barbour (2013: 436) allude to Browne’s daughter making illustrations for him, but I could find nothing definitive.

  8Raven (1942: 116).

  9Ibid. (115).

  10Ray (1942); Lankester (1846: 165).

  11Ibid. (Lankester: 250 n. 3).

  12Plot (1686: 229).

  13Gurney (1921: 189); Shrubb (2013).

  14Ray (1942); Lankester (1846: 166).

  15Ray (1942); Lankester (1846: 168).

  16Cram and Awbery (2001). We know that Willughby kept notebooks (now lost) for journeys other than Prestholme because he refers to them elsewhere. These include a ‘Cornwall Journy’ mentioned in his Commonplace Book (Mi LM 15/1 p. 481) and a ‘Worcester Journy’ mentioned in a letter (Mi LM 15/1 p. 486); doubtless there were others (D. Johnston, pers. comm.).

  17Derham (1760).

  18See Appendix 1.

  19Ray (1686a).

  20Lankester (1846: 171).

  21Ibid. (173).

  22Buxton and Lockley (1950); Birkhead (2016b); and see http://www.welshwildlife.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/History-of-Skomer-including-timeline.pdf.

  23Ornithology, 18.

  24Birkhead (2016c).

  25Ornithology, 18; Harvey (1981: 66).

  26Lankester (1846: 154).

  27http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Willisel,_Thomas_(DNB00), and Raven (1942: 151). Thomas Willisel was employed by the Royal Society to search out natural rarities: Ray described him ‘as the fittest man for such a purpose that I know in England’ (Lankester 1846: 151–2).

  28Ray and Willughby examined specimens of and described the red grouse in 1668 – see Chapter 7.

  29Ornithology, 326–7.

  30Lankester (1846: 175).

  31Ibid. (176).

  32This is based on the account given by Ray to his friend William Derham towards the end of Ray’s life, when on 15 May 1704 Derham ‘waited upon him at Black Notley’ and wrote: ‘These two gentlemen [Willughby and Ray], finding the History of Nature very imperfect, had agreed between themselves, before their travels beyond the sea, to reduce the several tribes of things to a method; and to give accurate descriptions of the several species, from a strict view of them. And forasmuch as Mr Willughby’s genius lay chiefly to animals, therefore he undertook the birds, beasts, fishes, and insects, as Mr Ray did the vegetables [plants]’ (Lankester 1846: 33). Here, ‘insects’ comprise true insects, but also a number of other invertebrate groups. What seems to be missing from Willughby and Ray’s subsequent writings are the ‘beasts’ or what Willughby and his contemporaries also called quadrupeds. It is unclear why quadrupeds (or rather, mammals) – with the exception of cetaceans – get almost no notice in Willughby and Ray’s work. Only in the 1690s and long after Willughby’s death did Ray acknowledge cetaceans to be distinct and more similar to quadrupeds than fish (Romero 2012). In the Preface (p. 3) to the Ornithology, Ray refers to Willughby’s interest in ‘beasts’: ‘Viewing his manuscripts after his death, I found the several animals in every kind both birds, beasts, fishes and insects digested into a method of his own contriving’, but apart from a few images of mammals in the Middleton Collection, there is little evidence that Willughby planned a volume on mammals.

  33Lankester (1846: 177).

  34Cram and Awbery (2001); Cram (2016).

  35From Willughby’s commonplace book: D. Johnston, pers. comm.

  36Diary of John Evelyn, p. 292, of this online version: https://archive.org/stream/diaryofjohnevely01eveliala.

  37Derham (1718).

  38The name ‘snap-apple bird’ used here by Willughby may have come from Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall (1602) – which Willughby owned – in which he notes the occurrence of a ‘flocke of birds in biggnesse not much exceeding a sparrow which made a foule spoyle of the apples. Their bils were thwarted crosse-wise at the end, and with these they would cut an apple in two at one snap eating only the kernels [seeds]’ (cited in Raven 1947: 246). In the Ornithology (248), Willughby and Ray refer to the crossbill as the ‘shell-apple’, a name Christopher Merret used in his ornithological compilation, Pinax (1667), as a name for the crossbill. This is a little confusing since Turner (1544) had previously used ‘sheld-appel’ to refer to the chaf
finch.

  39Hunter (1995: 37).

  40R. Serjeantson, pers. comm. The drainage of the Lincolnshire Fens by Dutch engineers, instigated by Charles I, was already underway by 1660, and was causing the loss of livelihoods for fishermen and wildfowlers.

  41Lankester (1846: 185–8).

  42McMahon (2000).

  43R. Serjeantson, pers. comm; McMahon (2000).

  44McMahon (2000).

  45Raven (1942: 61).

  46Johnston (2016: 7). The same letter as that in n. 37, but in its complete form, in the Middleton Collection.

  47From Birch (1756–7, vol. 1, 114): The observation of this embryo snake’s external hemipenes might have constituted a discovery had Willughby provided more eggs and from more clutches showing the same phenomenon among the male embryos, and noted that the hemipenes of newly hatched male snakes of the same species were no longer external, but were held inside the cloaca. It appears that no one (including Aristotle, Aldrovandi, Gessner and Topsell) had noted the external hemipenes of embryo male snakes (M. Olsson, pers. comm., K. Adler, pers. comm., November/December 2016).

  48Willughby attended Royal Society meetings on 1, 8 and 15 October 1662. On 8 October he presented his quincunial tree-planting solution; on 15 October he demonstrated the skin covering the eye of a whiting (fish), and continued a discussion of snakes.

  49From Hunter (1995).

  CHAPTER 4: CONTINENTAL JOURNEY: THE LOW COUNTRIES

  1Skippon (1732: 361).

  2Greengrass (2016).

  3Ibid.; Howell (1642).

  4Full quote: ‘those base and badder minds … who content their poore thoughts with their owne countries knowledge … were like sillie birds cooped up in a pen’. We have no direct evidence but some of Lipsius’s other works were in the Willughby library: W. Poole, pers. comm., and Poole (2016).

  5Iliffe (1998); Zeiler (1656).

  6For details of naval tensions see Greengrass (2016).

  7Iliffe (1998). Ray does not comment on Kircher’s museum in his published account of their travels, but the recent discovery of some of Ray’s manuscripts shows that he and Skippon visited the museum while travelling separately from Willughby and Bacon. The reason Ray omitted any reference to the museum may have been because he disapproved of the ‘self-promotion that was so central a feature of Kircher’s attitude to his museum’ (Hunter 2014).

  8Greengrass (2016).

  9Kusukawa (2016); see also Kusukawa (2000).

  10Hunter (2014).

  11Zwinger (1577).

  12Ray (1738).

  13Ray (1713: 150).

  14Ray (1738: 18). In Antwerp, Ray listed the many rare plants in the garden of the priest Franciscus van Steerbeck.

  15Ibid. (71).

  16Skippon (1732: 380).

  17Storey (1967).

  18Ray (1738: 19).

  19Skippon (1732: 385).

  20Ornithology, 61.

  21Ray (1738: 19) and Skippon (1732: 385).

  22Ornithology, 88.

  23Ibid., 87–8.

  24Ibid., 89.

  25Skippon (1732: 389).

  26Ray (1738: 24).

  27Ibid.

  28Ibid. (27–30).

  29Ibid. (31).

  30Ibid. (32) and Skippon (1732: 400).

  31Skippon (1732: 399–400).

  32Ray (1732: 27). Descartes on pineal gland: Lokhorst (2016).

  33Ornithology, 332. In Britain in Willughby’s day cormorants almost invariably nested on cliffs or on the ground rather than in trees, but the continental race of the cormorant Phalocrocorax carbo sinesis – the one Willughby and Ray saw in the Netherlands – did/does nest in trees: hence their surprise. In recent years P. c. sinesis has been recorded in Britain, and now some of ‘our’ race of the cormorant also nest in trees (Newson et al. 2007). On sending two boatloads to England, see Hegenitius and Ortelius (1630).

  34Graham Martin, pers. comm.

  35Ornithology, 288–9.

  36Preston (2016), an appendix to Greengrass (2016): the letter from Willughby to Ray was written in early September 1661, and I have assumed that Willughby was then at Middleton.

  37Mabey (2015).

  38The idea that skinks could be taken as an aphrodisiac originated with Pliny (Natural History XXVIII, 119), who states that ‘The Indian is the biggest scincus, then the Arabian one. They import these salted. Its snout and feet, taken with white wine, are aphrodisiac, especially when mixed with satyrion [either an orchid or ragwort] and rocket seed, mixing one handful of these with two handfuls of pepper.’ This sounds like a powerful concoction, but I have been unable to find any evidence for its efficacy.

  39A feral colony of night herons exists or existed near Edinburgh – escapees from Edinburgh Zoo (Dorward 1955) – but at the time of writing (2017) this ‘population’ comprises a single geriatric individual. A wild pair bred in Somerset in 2017.

  40Ornithology, 279.

  41Ibid., 277. I found it hard to believe that no one had previously seen and commented on Willughby’s collection of eggs, and sure enough, just when I had finished writing, I was reading John Gurney’s Early Annals of Ornithology (1921), a much undervalued book on the history of ornithology, and found (p. 211) the following: ‘The remnants of his egg collection still exist in a cabinet at Wollaton Hall. Most of the eggs have been written upon, and the writing is still legible, although the eggs themselves are faded and mostly cracked. Some heron’s eggs remain intact and these and an inscribed shoveler duck’s egg may have been procured by Willughby or Ray in Warwickshire, but we are tempted to associate a night heron’s egg (?) marked “Quacke Belge” with their visit to Sevenhuis in Holland.’ Interestingly, although the existence of the zoological specimens is poorly known, the seed collection has been known for some time (Welch 1972).

  42Vestjens (1975).

  43Raven (1942: 317).

  44Ornithology, 136.

  45Roos (2015: 446).

  46Ray (1738: 48).

  47http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/member/barnham-sir-francis-1576-1646.

  48Raven (1942: 65); Roos (2015: 118). A contemporaneous recipe for a tansy (an egg pudding) involved fifteen egg yolks, some sugar, dry sack (Spanish wine), a pint of cream, a flavouring of tansy, spinach and primrose leaves, all cooked until ‘pretty stiff’ and then fried in sweet butter (Samuel Pepys, The Pepys Companion).

  49Ray (1738: 44).

  CHAPTER 5: IMAGES OF CENTRAL EUROPE

  1 We know nothing of the meeting between Willughby and Balder: I have assumed, on the basis of information in Phillips (1925: 333) and Fluck and Scharback (2016), what took place.

  2Raven (1942: 354).

  3Phillips (1925: 336).

  4The quote is from Phillips (1925); Birkhead (2014: 131); Whitten (1971).

  5Phillips (1925).

  6Annotations to the drawing of a cormorant in the Brown University copy of Baldner.

  7Johannes Faber (1649), cited in Beike (2012).

  8Ornithology, 332.

  9 Raven (1942: 65); Roos (2015: 118). A contemporary recipe for a tansy (an egg pudding) involved fifteen egg yolks, some sugar, dry sack (Spanish wine) a pint of cream and a flavouring of tansy, spinach and primrose leaves, all cooked until ‘pretty stiff’ and then fried in sweet butter (Latham and Matthews 1983: 148).

  10Phillips (1925: 338).

  11Ornithology, Preface, 6. Ray’s reference to Baldner as ‘this poor man’, reinforces my view that Ray did not meet Baldner, and that Willughby went alone to meet him (see n.1 above), since the study by Fluck and Scharbach (2016) shows that Baldner was ‘not an ordinary fisherman with a gift for nature study, but a highly valued member of the fishermen’s corporation, a wealthy, learned citizen and a considerate father. He bequeathed a considerable legacy to his wife and children.’ They refer to him as a ‘fisherman and magistrate’.

  12Lauterborn (1903).

  13Phillips (1925).

  14Notes quoted from Brown University web pages; 5,000 books bequeathed to Br
own in 1979: https://search.library.brown.edu/?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Baldner.

  15Lownes (1940).

  16From Lauterborn (1903).

  17Anon.

  18Skippon (1732: 459).

  19Ornithology, 131.

  20Koreny (1985).

  21See Ray (1738). Philip Skippon’s description of Florence in https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/artdok/1216/2/Daly_Davis_Fontes51.pdf.

  22Ornithology, 147.

  23Clark (1981).

  24Skippon (1732: 468); Muffet in Health’s Improvement (1655) does not mention raptors being eaten at all, but of jays he says that they ‘never come unto the number of good nourishment’; of the starling he says that the ‘flesh is dry and sanery [meaning not clear]’; of the wren, ‘no man ever wrote that it give good nourishment’, and of tits, ‘all of them feed ill, and nourish worse’. Skippon may have obtained his opinion about which birds were worth eating or not from Muffet.

  25Ornithology, Preface, 6.

  26Skippon (1732: 468).

  27Ibid.

  28Hoffman (1660).

  29Skippon (1732: 469).

  30Throughout the Middle Ages and right up to Willughby’s day this species was known as St Cuthbert’s duck. ‘Imprinted’ refers to the fact that it was hatched in captivity and as a result ‘imprinted’ on its owner, St Cuthbert, because this was the first thing it saw.

  31Skippon (1732: 470).

  32Greengrass (2016).

  33Aldrovandi (1648).

  34Roos (2016).

  35Mynott (2018).

  36Eyles (1955); Edwards (1967).

  37Skippon (1732: 476–9).

  38On 1 August 1664 – known as the Battle of St Gotthard in Ottoman and Hungarian sources, and as the Battle of Mogersdorf in Austrian ones.

  39Skippon (1732: 480).

  40Ibid.

  41Ibid. (481).

  CHAPTER 6: ITALIAN SOPHISTICATION AND SPANISH DESOLATION

  1Ray (1738: 124).

  2Zimmerman (2008): water from snow or glaciers lacks iodine.

  3Ray (1732: 168).

  4Skippon (1732: 502): literally Out, out – onto the stage; in modern Italian: Fuori.

  5Ibid.

  6Greengrass (2016).

  7History of Insects, 7, trans. John Wade (pers. comm.).

  8Skippon (1732: 500).