Francis Willughby

In South Wales, Willughby and Ray saw a rare black-winged stilt shown here in the Ornithologiae Libri Tres as "Himantopus".

In May 1662, Willughby, Ray and Philip Skippon, Ray's student, set out on a second journey through Nantwich and Chester and west to Anglesey. They returned inland to Llanberis and were shown a local lake fish called a torgoch, which Willughby recognised as essentially the same as the Windermere charr he had described previously in the Lake District. The party then headed south through west Wales to Pembroke, visiting Bardsey Island on the way.[23] They then proceeded back along the Welsh south coast to Tenby, where they saw many fish species, and Aberavon, where they were shown a rare black-winged stilt.[24]

Willughby interviewed Welsh speakers to attempt a systematic study of the language that, although never published, influenced subsequent scholars.[25] It was during this trip that Ray and Willughby decided to attempt to classify all living things, with Ray mainly working on plants and Willughby on animals.[3][26] The tables of species they produced were used by Wilkins as part of a unifying scheme later published in 1668 as An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language. Wilkins' intention was to create a universal terminology to describe the natural world, and the study of languages and writing systems was meant to create a logical linguistic framework for his classification.[27][28]

Willughby and his companions parted company when he fell ill at Gloucester while they continued through the West Country to Land's End. When Willughby had recovered, he spent part of the summer birdwatching in Lincolnshire.[29] Ray and Willughby later visited the West Country together in 1667, returning via Dorset, Hampshire and London.[30]

Approximate reconstruction of the journeys through Europe

  Willughby, Ray, Bacon and Skippon

  Ray and Skippon to Sicily and Malta

  Willughby and Bacon head north

   Willughby alone

In August 1662 Ray resigned his Fellowship at Cambridge, being unwilling to subscribe to the requirements of the Act of Uniformity imposed on Church of England clerics. Unemployed and without a source of income, his position might have been difficult, but Willughby offered him accommodation and work at Middleton, writing "I am likely to spend much of my life afterwards in wandring or else in Private Studiing at Oxford. having but little heart to thinke of settling, or ingaging in a family. I shall bee Verie glad of your constant company and assistance in my studies".[29]

In April 1663, Willughby, Ray, Skippon and Nathaniel Bacon (another friend from Trinity) departed for continental Europe on a pre-planned itinerary armed with the requisite passports and letters of introduction to notable personages,[31] with Willughby's wealth making the trip financially viable. They intended to visit museums, libraries and private collections, and also study local animals and plants. Given the limitations of time on their demanding schedule, fish and bird markets were a useful source of information and specimens.[11][32] Although all kept journals, most of Willughby's are lost,[22] and the journey is mainly documented in Ray's Observations topographical, moral & physiological made in a journey through part of the Low-Countries, Germany, Italy and France, which included Willughby's notes from Spain.[30]

The travellers visited Brussels, the University of Leuven, Antwerp, Delft, The Hague and Leiden's university and public library. On 5 June[lower-alpha 9] they visited a colony of cormorants, grey herons and spoonbills at Zevenhuizen, and Willughby dissected a spoonbill chick obtained there.[34] The party continued north through Haarlem, Amsterdam and Utrecht before heading to Strasbourg,[35] where Willughby made a diversion to buy a handwritten book from its author, Leonard Baldner. This book was illustrated with paintings of birds, fish and other animals.[35][lower-alpha 10]

Baldner was a prosperous former fisherman, town councillor and self-taught naturalist who, like the Englishmen, only wrote about what he saw.[35] Frederick Slare FRS made a translation of the German text into English,[37][38] later added to Willughby's copy after his death.[35] Ray claimed in his preface to the Ornithology: "For my part, I must needs acknowledge that I have received much light and information from the Work of this poor man, and have been thereby inabled to clear many difficulties, and rectifie some mistakes in Gesner.", although in practice few of Baldner's insights were incorporated into the text.[39]

A room in the Palazzo Publico, Bologna, visited by Willughby's group to see the collections of Ferdinando Cospi and Ulisse Aldrovandi.

The party continued through Liège, Cologne and Nuremberg,[40] and arrived in Vienna on 15 September where they stayed for several days before leaving on 24 September for Venice.[41][lower-alpha 11] The journey through the Alps was arduous, with poor mountain tracks, bad weather and little food except bread, and it was 6 October before they reached their destination, where Skippon listed 60 species of fish and 28 kinds of birds he had noted in the Venetian markets.[41]

The group remained in Venice from 6 October 1663 to 1 February 1664,[41] apart from a trip to Padua, where they investigated medical procedures including the dissection of human corpses. They then travelled through northern Italy, stopping in Ferrara, Verona, Bologna, Milan and Genoa, before setting sail for Naples from Livorno on 15 April 1664.[41][43] It was here that the party divided, Willughby and Bacon heading to Rome, where they spent May, June and July,[44] while Ray and Skippon went on to Sicily and Malta.[41]

Throughout the continental journey, Willughby and Skippon in particular had continued their research into languages.[45] In Vienna, apart from visiting the local collections, they had taken the opportunity to study Turkish and several Slavic languages,[41] and surviving manuscripts show comparison tables for seventeen languages including Basque, Armenian and Persian.[46]

Bacon contracted smallpox somewhere in Northern Italy, and Willughby continued with just a servant to Montpellier, where Ray was already present. Willughby entered Spain on 31 August and progressed through Valencia, Granada, Seville, Cordoba and Madrid, reaching Irun on 14 November.[47][lower-alpha 12] Willughby found little of scientific interest in Spain, which he considered backward. He also disliked the land and the people: "almost desolate... tyrannical inquisition... multitude of whores... wretched laziness... very like the Welsh and Irish."[48]

Willughby's Ornithology was intended to describe all the then-known birds worldwide.[62] Its innovative features were an effective classification system based on anatomical features, such the bird's beak, feet and overall size, and a dichotomous key, which helped readers to identify birds by guiding them to the page describing that group.[63] The authors also placed an asterisk against species of which they had no first-hand knowledge, and were therefore unable to verify.[64] Willughby had been keen to add details of "characteristic marks" to help with identification.[65] The authors also largely avoided the practice of previous writers, such as Conrad Gessner, by not including extraneous material relating to the species, such as proverbs, references in history and literature, or use as an emblem.[66] The book was published in Latin as Ornithologiae Libri Tres (Three Books of Ornithology) in 1676.[67]

The first of the three sections included an introduction to bird biology, an explanation of the new classification system and the dichotomous key. The second and third sections described land birds and seabirds respectively.[68] Emma Willughby paid for the 80 metal-engraved plates that completed the work, and this is acknowledged on the title page.[69][70] The English-language version, The Ornithology of Francis Willughby of Middleton, published in 1678, included additional material, including a section on fowling to broaden its appeal, but had no mention of Willughby's widow.[71] Its commercial success is unknown, but its influence was profound.[72]

The next book, on fish, was many years in the making; Willughby's widow had remarried, and her new husband, Josiah Child, had barred Ray from accessing his friend's papers. Furthermore, there were far more known species of fish than there were birds to describe, and Ray was working on his own History of Plants.[73][74] The Historia Piscium was finally published in Latin in 1686 with a dedication to Samuel Pepys, President of the Royal Society, who had made a generous financial contribution to the project. The book had four sections: an introduction to fish biology; cetaceans; cartilaginous fish (sharks and rays); and bony fish, the last group being further classified by the number and nature of their fins. 187 plates completed the work, their cost making the book a financial disaster for the Royal Society, which had largely funded its publication.[73][75][76]

Willughby studied this leaf-cutter bee, named by Kirby in 1802 as Megachile willughbiella.

In the seventeenth century, the term "insect" had a much wider meaning than it does today, so the third major book, Historia Insectorum, included many other invertebrates, such as worms, spiders and millipedes. It excluded molluscs, perhaps because Martin Lister, another Fellow of the Royal Society, was writing his own Historia Animalium that covered that group. Ray's problems with completing this publication were much the same as with the fish book, although in 1704 he was able to see manuscripts prepared independently by Sir Thomas Willoughby and the scholar Thomas Man, Sir Thomas having moved into Wollaton Hall in 1687 and regained access to Middleton and his father's papers and possessions.[77]

Ray died in January 1705, and little happened with the Historia Insectorum until William Derham and the Royal Society finally published it in 1710 in Latin, incomplete, unillustrated and under Ray's name only.[77] Ray, however, makes it clear that Willughby did the bulk of the insect research,[78] including, for example, 20 pages of beetle descriptions.[79] The book had four sections, starting with an innovative classification system based on metamorphosis.[77] The second section contained the main species descriptions, followed by Ray's observations of butterflies and moths and their caterpillars, and an appendix by Martin Lister on British beetles.[80] Plates prepared by Sir Thomas Willoughby were not used, and they have now been lost, as have the manuscripts Sir Thomas showed to Ray.[77]

Willughby is believed to have studied probability with respect to card games. This 17th-century Popish Plot deck was engraved by Francis Barlow, whose bird paintings were the basis of some of the illustrations in the Ornithology.

Willughby's Book of Games was unfinished at his death,[lower-alpha 15] but was published with accompanying interpretative material in 2003. He gave details of dozens of games and sports, including cards, cockfighting, football and word games; some are now unfamiliar, such as "Lend me your Skimmer".[82] For each entry he included the rules, equipment and manner of play.[83] He also studied the first games that babies and children play,[82] and wrote a more mathematical section "On the rebounding of tennis balls".[84] As with his biological works, the Book of Games is organised on the empirical principles of observation, description, and classification.[82]

A lost work appears to have been one that, according to his daughter Cassandra, "shews the chances of most games",[85] which may have been titled The Book of Dice ("Historii Chartitudii").[86][87] Willughby was a competent mathematician,[88] and there is evidence that the lost text considered probability with regard to card and dice games.[89]

The numerous plates illustrating the species in the bird and fish books came from a number of sources. Willughby's own extensive collection included paintings he had bought on his European travels, and he also borrowed pictures owned by friends like Skippon and Sir Thomas Browne. Many illustrations were taken from previous publications by other writers,[90] and some were based on Francis Barlow's oil-paintings of birds in Charles II's aviary in St James's Park.[91][92]

The illustrations taken from earlier books were from many sources, particularly the earlier natural histories or ornithologies by Ulisse Aldrovandi, Pietro Olina, Georg Marcgrave and Willem Piso.[93] Where feasible, Willughby and Ray compared the available illustrations with life or specimens, or, if that were not possible, against each other, to select the most accurate version for publication.[70] In addition to these authors, sources used for the text included works by Carolus Clusius, Adriaen Collaert, Gervase Markham, Juan Eusebio Nieremberg and Ole Worm.[93][94] Olina's Ucelliera, at least, seems to have been revisited between the Latin and English editions of the Ornithology, since the later version contains a description of territorial behaviour by the nightingale absent from the earlier work.[95]

• Birkhead, Tim (9 March 2012). "The first ornithologist: Francis Willughby". Public history of science lecture. Royal Society. Retrieved 8 February 2019.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Francis Willughby.

• Middleton archives at the University of Nottingham
• M. S. (1833). Jardine, William (ed.). "Mr Francis Willughby's epitaph" (PDF). The Naturalist's Library. v (1): 98. doi:10.5962/bhl.title.17346.
• National Geographic interview with Tim Birkhead "The Amazing Tale of the Genius that History Forgot".