by Tim Birkhead
9Ibid. (501); Broise and Jolivet (2009). Note: there are plenty of current North American recipes for terrapin soup or stew on the Internet, even though most freshwater turtles are protected.
10Skippon (1732: 519).
11Ibid. (496).
12Historia Piscium, 132.
13Ibid. (307).
14Ibid. (287).
15Ibid. (156).
16Ibid. (294).
17Ibid. (300).
18Ibid. (311).
19Ibid. (331).
20Ibid. (132).
21Skippon (1732: 504).
22MacPherson (1897: 35); Vogelsang (1949).
23Angelini (1724).
24Ornithology, Preface, 6.
25Ibid. (196).
26Jackson (1993, vol 1: 42).
27I asked the Caravaggio expert Andrew Graham Dixon about this and he was confident that the painting was not by Caravaggio (pers. comm.). On the website below it is attributed to the Master of Hartford; it is in the Galleria Borghese, Rome, dated before 1607. http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/illustration/still-life-with-birds-by-master-of-hartford-1590-1600-stock-graphic/132701607.
28Skippon (1732: 517).
29T. Pizzari, pers. comm.
30Skippon (1732: 534). Note: £25 in the 1660s was very roughly equivalent to £1,700 today; and the ten zucchini offered by Willughby was approximately half of what Regio asked for. Tom Pizzari found this text, Nuova geografia, tradotta in lingua toscana da Gaudioso Jagemann (1780), from a library in Vienna. Volume 15 has a footnote which implies that 1 zecchino was worth £0.5. They met Regio in Padua.
31Gessner, cited in Smith and Findlen (2001).
32Ibid.
33Park (1997).
34Ray (1738: 182).
35Hunter (2014).
36Preston (2016).
37Technically an amphipod, not a true shrimp, and related to the more familiar Gammarus of British streams and rivers, Niphargus costozzae occurs in many cave systems in the Vento and Verona regions of northern Italy. It was formally identified and named in 1835 (Pierre Marmonier, pers. comm.). See https://ortobotanicobologna.wordpress.com/ovidio-montalbano-en.
38Ray (1738: 188).
39Skippon (1732: 573).
40See https://ortobotanicobologna.wordpress.com/ovidio- montalbano-en.
41See http://www.filosofia.unibo.it/aldrovandi/pinakesweb/main.asp?language=it.
42Skippon (1732: 757).
43Greengrass (2016).
44See https://valentinagurarie.wordpress.com/tag/conrad-gessner.
45Ragnar Kinzelbach, pers. comm.
46Ray (1738: 234). The Academy visited by Willughby in Naples was L’Accademia degli Investiganti (Researchers or Investigators Academy), founded in 1630 and shut down in 1656 because of the plague; reopened in 1664. The Academy was shut down again by the viceroy in 1668, although members continue to meet informally after this. Several prominent members were arrested because of their openly secular views, but narrowly escaped the Inquisition thanks to an earthquake: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accademia_degli_Investiganti.
47Ray (1738: 52, 136).
48Raven (1942: 138); Lister had been at St John’s in Cambridge while Ray was at Trinity, so it is possible that they already knew each other before meeting in the sunny south of France.
49Lewis (2012).
50Birkhead and Charmantier (2009).
51Ray (1738).
52Howell (1642: 52); Zeiler (1656).
53Derham (1718).
54Ornithology, 315.
55Derham (1718: 12): the original is in the Natural History Museum archives, MSS Ray, fo. 2, item 3.
CHAPTER 7: BACK AT MIDDLETON
1Wood (1958: 92).
2He died on 7 December 1665 and like other family members was duly buried at Middleton church.
3Wood (1958: 110).
4Ibid. (108).
5Ibid. (109).
6Letter dated 22 October 1666 in Derham (1718).
7Oswald and Preston (2011: 276).
8Ibid. (278).
9Turner (1554) cited in Evans (1903); Oswald and Preston (2011: 276).
10Aristotle, History of Animals, Book V, Part 1.
11Oswald and Preston (2011: 276).
12Willughby (1671).
13Ibid.; Lister (1671).
14Lister (1671).
15The parasitoids that Willughby observed in the cabbage white larvae were the larvae of the wasp Cotesia glomeratus: see Thomas and Lewington (2010).
16Ray, Historia Insectorum (1710), cited in Oswald and Preston (2011: 279).
17Ibid. (279); see also Lentern and Godfray 2005 (cited therein). Leeuwenhoek’s first letter on aphid parasitoids to the Royal Society is dated 1687 (Malina 2008). We also know that Willughby owned a copy of Goedaert’s Metamorphosis Naturalis (1660–9), which contains images of parasitoids, as well as different life stages of insects.
18Letter from Charles Darwin to Asa Gray 22 May 1860. Darwin Correspondence Project, ‘Letter no. 2814’, accessed 2 January 2017.
19King (1614–81) was identified by Roos (2015: 445 n. 3).
20Birch (1756–7), vol. II, pp. 435 and 449, on Willughby’s two letters being read to the Royal Society.
21King (1670).
22Quoted in Jardine (1864: 87).
23Willughby (1671) cited in Ogilvie (2016a).
24Mullens (1911) says Spain rather than Italy.
25From Neri (2011: 31, 202).
26Muffet (1634).
27It is not known whether Thomas Muffett wrote the rhyme for her; it first appears in print in the early 1800s (Opie and Opie 1997: 323–4).
28Raven (1942: 183).
29Roos (2015: 230).
30As Romero (2012) has pointed out, when Ray was in Chester in 1669 dissecting his porpoise, he considered it to be a ‘fish’ (albeit a special one); by the time he produced Historia Piscium in 1686, he realised that cetaceans are distinct, and it is only in 1693, when he produced Synopsis Methodica Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpenti Generis, that he was completely convinced that cetaceans were not fish. He says: ‘For except as to the place on which they live, the external form of the body, the hairless skin and progressive swimming motion: they have almost nothing in common with fishes, but remaining characters agree with the viviparous quadrupeds.’
31Roos (2015: 457). The death of John Wilkins: he was thought initially to have died ‘of the stone’, that is kidney stones, hence the ‘stoppage of urine’, but an autopsy revealed only ‘two small stones in one kidney and some litte gravell in one ureter but neither big enough to stop the water. Twas believed his opiates and some other medicines killd him’ (from the diary of Wilkins’s close friend Robert Hooke, cited by Jardine [2003]).
32Locke (1690), D. Cram, pers.comm.
33Newton (1896: 31).
34Stresemann (1975: 177).
35Firestein (2012).
36The differences between the honey-buzzard and common buzzard are from the Ornithology, p. 72; the rest is my reconstruction.
37Roos (2015: 98).
38Raven (1942: 143–5).
39Wood (1958); Johnston (2016). We do not know for certain who Thomas Alured was, but the most likely candidate is the son of John Alured (1607–51), Parliamentary officer and regicide. Thomas Alured entered Gray’s Inn on 12 July 1655 and was therefore roughly contemporaneous with Francis Willughby, who was admitted in 1657, and with Francis Jessop, admitted in 1656. The Alured family lived in or near Hull and Thomas Alured became a barrister and a recorder (1688–1700) of Beverly (near Hull) and gave a large collection of books to Beverly parish library; http://www.robert-temple.com. Assuming Thomas Alured was a friend of Willughby’s, this may explain Francis’s ownership and annotation of one of the printed records of the legal action against the regicides: An exact and most impartial accompt of the indictment, arraignment, trial, and judgment (according to law) of nine and twenty regicides, the murtherers of His late sacred Majesty of most glorious memory (London: Printed for Andrew Crook and Edward Powel, 1660)
.
40Johnston (2003). Katherine married (in 1666) Clement Winstanley, a ‘gentleman that loved his pleasures, and spent more to gratifie them than his estate would bear’. He died, in debt, in 1672 (Wood 1958).
41Wood (1958: 111).
42Raven (1942: 316, 319); Armytage (1952).
43Ragnar Kinzelbach, pers. comm.
44Ornithology (259); Derham (1718: 367).
45Derham (1718: 367).
46Roos (2015: 176).
47Derham (1718: 368).
48I suspect that the impetus for Francis’s experiments on the flow of sap in the spring of 1665 was the Royal Society’s committee, established earlier that year, whose ‘Queries concerning vegetation’ were eventually published in 1668. The information was transcribed from Francis Willughby’s comonplace book (Mi LM 15 pp. 433–4) by Dorothy Johnston and sent to the author on 15 November 2016.
49The Royal Society’s paper was: ‘Queries concerning vegetation, especially the motion of the juyces of vegetables’ (1668); Willughby and Ray’s brief account was published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in January 1669.
50Roos (2015).
51See http://5e.plantphys.net/article.php?id=99.
52Johnston (2003).
53Hunter (1989: 247–9).
54Hall and Hall (1965–86): letters starting 19 March 1670.
55Ibid.
56H. Smith, pers. comm. However, wolf spiders (Lycosidae) have been reported attacking tiny, newly metamorphosed American toads Anaxyrus (Bufo) americanus (Ecology 2014: 95: 1724–30). Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (he who built his own microscopes and discovered the existence of spermatozoa) reported to the Royal Society in 1701 that he had conducted experiments in which he set up spiders with young frogs (about one and a half inches in length), one of which died after being bitten by ‘a great spider’.
57Welch (1972).
58Cram et al. (2003: 61).
59Ibid. (198).
60Ibid. (71).
61Hall and Hall (1965–86).
62See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Cyrus, and Aldersey-Williams (2015).
63Cram et al. (2003: 55).
CHAPTER 8: CURIOUS ABOUT BIRDS, ILLNESS AND DEATH
1Huynen et al. (2010).
2Jardine (1843).
3See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope.
4Ransome (1947): it seems from Wikipedia that the phrase may have come from an ornithologist and adult fan, Myles North.
5Ornithology, 188.
6The images in the Collins Bird Guide (2009) were originally published by Bonnier Fakta in Sweden; Collins produced it for the English market.
7Dan Zetterström, pers. comm., 11 June 2015.
8Fowler et al. (2009).
9Cade (1967); T. Cade, pers. comm., 9 January 2013.
10Schulze-Hagen and Birkhead (2015); Birkhead et al. (2014).
11Leisler and Schulze-Hagen (2013).
12Those ‘functional’ questions also re-emerge in Ray’s Wisdom of God (1691), which was based on his early sermons.
13Aristotle, History of Animals; Aelian: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/aelian/varhist1.xhtml; and Harvey on Generation (see Whitteridge, trans., 1981).
14Durham and Marryat (1908).
15Thuman et al. (2003); Jaatinen et al. (2010).
16Ray (1738: 128–9).
17Ornithology, 169 (quail) and 249 (house sparrow – famous for its frequent copulations).
18Gunn (1912); Fitzpatrick (1934).
19Kinsky (1971).
20Feare (1984).
21Gurney Jr. (1878) refers to guillemot eggs found on the seabed well away from any colony and states: ‘We have in our collection an egg that was dredged up at Lowestoft at a depth of 24 fathoms.’
22Reynard and Savory (1999).
23Birkhead et al. (2011: 24); Chaplin (1976); Reinertsen (1983).
24Belon (1555).
25 Belon (1555).
26Valli da Todi (1601); Olina (1622); Manzini (1575).
27Birkhead and Charmantier (2013).
28Other aspects of bird biology established from studies of captive birds include: ways of distinguishing the sexes without the need for dissection; the underlying mechanisms of birds’ breeding seasons; instinct and intelligence; and longevity (Birkhead and van Balen 2008).
29Ornithology, 373.
30Ibid.
31Willughby’s strange (and hardly comprehensible) ideas on moult are cited by Raven (1942: 336) as an example of an outlandish idea that Ray would have rolled his eyes at. It is curious, then, that Ray bothered to include that particular bit of text in the Ornithology. Mary Fissel, pers. comm.
32Stresemann (1975).
33Brian Follett, pers. comm.
34Stresemann and Stresemann (1966).
35Kral (1965).
36Mounted skeletons (Skippon 1732: 391).
37Letters dated 28 April and 22 December 1670 (Roos 2015: 266–7 and 285). ‘Tertian ague’ must have been a general term, for both John Ray and Martin Lister as well as Francis Willughby suffered from occasional bouts of it (Roos 2015: 262–3).
38Johnston (2016).
39Ibid.
40Birch (1756–7).
41This is from Wood (1958) with information on medical practice in the seventeenth century provided by Michael Collins (British Society for the History of Medicine, pers. comm., 26 October 2016). Willughby owned a copy of Sydenham’s (1666) Methods for Curing Fevers (William Poole, pers. comm., 26 October 2016). Information on Dr Anthony Hewitt, Willughby’s physician, came from Jonathan Barry, pers. comm., 18 October 2016.
CHAPTER 9: INTO THE LIGHT: PUBLICATION
1Johnston (2016).
2Katherine Willoughby’s husband, who died in 1672, was Clement Winstanley; see Johnston (2003, 2016).
3Information on the magpie comes from two letters in the Middleton Collection (Mi Av 143/36/20 and 21): D. Johnston, pers. comm.
4Raven (1942: 320) provides details of these volumes.
5Poole (2016).
6Doherty (2010); Birkhead et al. (2016).
7Raven (1942: 310); Ray said this of Charleton: ‘Whatever he may boast of his performance … he … did not understand animals nor had any comprehensive knowledge of them.’
8Stresemann (1975), Charlton at the RS 22 October 1662: ‘Dr Charlton [sic] brought in his papers, in which he had reduced birds into certain families, in Latin and English; which papers were ordered to be kept; and the doctor was desired, in conjunction with Dr Merrett, to reduce fishes into the like classes.’ (Birch 1756, vol. 1: 118).
9Ornithology, Preface, 7; see also Raven (1942: 310).
10Volcher Coiter’s volume is not on the list in the Willughby library catalogue (W. Poole, pers. comm.); Pierre de La Ramée (aka Petrus Ramus) (1515–72); Theodor Zwinger, author of Methodus Apodemica. ‘Dichotomous’ means dividing or branching into two and is a way of identifying things, such as birds, using contrasting features (e.g. land birds versus water birds; webbed feet versus not webbed feet; bill yellow versus bill not yellow, etc.), into smaller and smaller groups, such that eventually you are left with only two options and therefore are able to identify the species.
11Ornithology, 154.
12Griffing (2011).
13Ornithology, Preface, 4.
14Ibid.
15Griffing (2011).
16Johnston (2016).
17Derham abstracted some of Ray’s letters containing details of his reproductive issues. His abstracts are in the back of NHM MSS Ray 1 at the Natural History Museum (London), and there is the letter among Lister’s correspondence in the Bodleian Library (numbered 0255 in the edition) that gives some of the details. Gunther’s Further Correspondence of John Ray (1928) includes some of these abstracts. An image of the letter 0255 can be seen at http://tinyurl.com/6wro6r8.
18Marquis de Sade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantharidin.
19Heneberg (2016); another idea is that bustards consume blister beetles as a form of self-medication agains
t parasites (Bravo et al. 2014).
20Raven (1942: 309).
21Roos (2015: 8).
22The term ‘history’, as in ‘natural history’, meant, at least originally, the results of their own investigations. In contrast, the term traité (as in Traité du rossignol [nightingale] by Nicolas Venette [1697] – see Chapter 8) referred to an account based on existing literature.
23Griffing (2011).
24Roos (2015: 155). Lister’s advice was either verbal, or the letter no longer exists (A. M. Roos, pers. comm.).
25Ray to Henry Oldenburg, 19 September 1674, in Ray (1928), 66. See also Wragge-Morley (2010) on the importance of written descriptions.
26Montgomerie and Birkhead (2009).
27Olina (1622).
28Marcgraf and Piso (1648).
29The Pitangaguacul is the broad-billed flycatcher Megarhynchus pitangua; the Yzquauhtli remains unidentified (Alexander Lees, pers. comm.).
30Grigson (2016); Flis (2015); Barlow’s images were made popular by his illustrated Aesop’s Fables published in 1666.
31Ornithology, 389.
32Ibid., 211.
33Ibid., 209.
34Ibid., 229.
35Browne (1646); Ornithology, 146.
36Birkhead et al. (2014).
37Suh (2016).
38Ornithology, Preface, 6.
39On the final page of the Preface to the Ornithology, Ray lists several errata, and explains that some birds are illustrated twice, because they weren’t very well executed the first time.
40Birkhead (2003); Derham (1718: 140).
41Roos (2015: 221).
42Philosophical Transactions, 16 August 1669: see Derham (1718: 52–4); see also Roos (2011: 108).
43Roos (2015: 276 n. 17).
44Ornithology, Preface, 9; ‘fatty juyce’; also Ornithology, 273.
45Muffet (1655) mentions eating woodcock brains.
46Ornithology, 290.
47Muffet (1655). Unfortunately, Hugh Cott’s (1945) palatability tests of a wide range of bird species, conducted in the 1940s, are not of much help because his methodology was so poor.
48Johnston (2016); John Evelyn’s Diary.
49Raven (1942: 339); Roos (2015: 745), letter dated 17 July 1676. Ray’s botanical output was prodigious – as outlined at length by Raven (1942), securing him the undeniable reputation as the most influential early modern botanist.
50Raven (1942: 340).