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A Prodigious Namer of Nature

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A Prodigious Namer of Nature COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS “Chymistry”, as prac- tised by Robert Boyle and other natural philosophers, was then evolving from NHM LONDON/SPL medieval alchemy to modern chemistry. It sought the transmu- tation of base metals into gold even as it was The Wonderful Mr Willughby: harnessed for applica- The First True tions such as weapons Ornithologist manufacture. Eventu- TIM BIRKHEAD ally, Willughby and Bloomsbury (2018) Ray criss-crossed England and Wales on their birding and plant-hunting expeditions. Around 1662, they set themselves an ambitious goal: observing, describing and classifying all species. They felt that both the literature and the nomenclature sowed con- fusion. Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner’s History of Animals (1551–58), for instance, mixed ancient knowledge with observation. By contrast, Ray and Willughby grounded their system in precise anatomical descrip- tion, distinguishing between even closely related species. Beginning with British spe- cies and extending to mainland Europe, they A peacock and (below) a established a taxonomy that would be built dodo from Francis Willughby’s on by centuries of naturalists, including Carl 1676 Ornithologiae libri tres. Linnaeus in the mid-eighteenth century. Dividing birds into land and water fowl, they NATURAL HISTORY deployed attributes such as beak shape to create a branching classification key. Willughby thrived on collaboration, and used his wealth to enable it. In 1662, Ray A prodigious resigned his college fellowship, rather than subscribe to the Act of Uniformity passed by Parliament to fortify Charles II’s newly restored monarchy. Willughby invited his namer of nature mentor into his household. The next year, Willughby was elected an “original fellow” of the Royal Society, and he and Ray, with Elizabeth Yale relishes a biography of a seventeenth- Ray’s students Philip Skippon and Nathaniel century polymath with a notable gift for collaboration. Bacon, ventured on a tour across Europe. They attended university lectures and visited cabinets of curiosity — troves of rancis Willughby was a wide-ranging “new sciences”, reading the works of Galileo exotica where they handled a hornbill’s head virtuoso in a virtuosic age. Remem- Galilei, Francis Bacon and René Descartes. and an elephant’s tail. They collected birds’ bered for a pioneering study of bird And he took copious notes, organized by eggs and a book of paintings of birds and Fclassification, the seventeenth-century natu- topic, in his commonplace book — the fish from Leonard Baldner, keeper of forests ral historian pursued interests in entomol- database of the era. in Strasbourg, now part of France. In rented ogy, botany, linguistics, games and chance, A sociable man, Willughby found friends rooms, they dissected and drew fish from and the reform of biological classification. who spurred him on. As Birkhead relates, Venice markets, a servant often doing the That he is not better known may be put the most important was Trinity dirty work. They visited the museum of six- down to his death at 36. In The Wonderful Mr College fellow John Ray. Ray teenth-century naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi Willughby, ornithologist Tim Birkhead brings encouraged Willughby’s in Bologna and attended his creative energies and contributions to life. interests in mathematics human dissections. Of this Born in England in 1635, the only son and took him botanizing. It very Protestant crew, Wil- NHM LONDON/SPL in an established family of the gentry, was during these jaunts that lughby alone braved the Willughby inherited estates in Warwickshire Willughby observed puzzling dusty roads of Catholic Spain, and Nottinghamshire. At the University of transformations in caterpil- which he viewed as a forbid- Cambridge, where polite young men usually lars that sparked entomological ding closed society. acquired a smattering of culture and influ- discoveries. In the late 1650s, the After they returned to ential connections, he took a different path pair embarked on a programme England in the mid-1660s, — into scientific discovery. He dived into the of “chymical” experimentation. Ray stayed on at Willughby’s 28 | NATURE | VOL 557 | 3 MAY 2018©2018 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. ©2018 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT estate as the latter married, had children and managed his lands. Birkhead gives a won- derful sense of the pair’s delight in nature, Books in brief even as Willughby, never robust, began to have recurring fevers. Inspired by physi- Edge of Chaos cian William Harvey’s discovery of blood Dambisa Moyo LITTLE, BROWN (2018) circulation, published in 1628, Willughby Does the “new normal” in many democracies, from high contemplated the movement of sap in trees unemployment to political turmoil, make them poor models years before the subject surfaced in the Royal for sustainable growth? In this trenchant analysis, economist Society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions. Dambisa Moyo explores that provocative question. She examines He was the first to classify insects by their growth across the political spectrum, from China to the United States, metamorphoses, recognizing that a caterpil- and probes entangled challenges such as debt and protectionism. lar, pupa and butterfly were life stages of one Unsurprisingly, she points to an urgent need for political reform. insect, not separate species. He asked astute Her blueprint for that (including civics courses for the electorate) is questions, such as which birds survive win- ambitious, but, as she asserts, “All the easy choices are behind us”. ters by migrating. He observed the life cycle of a leaf-cutter bee, later named after him — Megachile willughbiella. He even wrote a Eye of the Shoal study on games, from football to cards. Helen Scales BLOOMSbuRY SIGMA (2018) Birkhead’s account is vividly textured, Marine biologist Helen Scales’s Spirals in Time (2015) opened up drawing from his collaborations with science a whorled wonderland of marine molluscs. This gifted writer now historians. We follow Willughby from seabird deep-dives into piscine realms. Scales, whose research has spanned nesting grounds on the Isle of Man to glass- the South China Sea and Australia’s Ningaloo coral reef, weaves the making factories in Murano, Venice. Willugh- history of ichthyology with explorations of adaptations, such as how by’s letters and notebooks, full of his swift, glycoproteins act like ‘antifreeze’ in the blood, and why shoaling impatient writing, tell how avidly he worked. saves energy. Perhaps most beguiling are the hums and pops of fish The strangeness of his scientifically liminal ‘calls’, which the creatures sense through the lateral line — a series century shines through, exemplified by an of organs that effectively turn their bodies into giant ears. “insect” collected in Italy, a fake made from a moray eel’s jaws and a thorny plant. Birkhead tightens the links between Willughby’s work Now You’re Talking and modern biology, confirming that he and Trevor Cox BODLEY HEAD (2018) Ray identified some 90% of around 200 bird On average, humans utter 500 million words over a lifetime. And it’s species often seen in England and Wales. a crazily complex process, as acoustic engineer Trevor Cox reveals As Birkhead emphasizes, the bond in this intensive survey. Speaking involves “anatomical gymnastics” between the restless Willughby and the more linked to multiple brain regions; hearing is a subtle decoding of restrained Ray was extraordinarily fruitful. tone, timbre and sense. Cox’s investigation sweeps from the putative Yet there were challenges, not least differences protolanguage of human ancestor Homo heidelbergensis to the in social circumstances. Willughby was a gen- likelihood of creative algorithmic discourse. In between, he looks at tleman, Ray a blacksmith’s son — disparities the infant’s acquisition of language, the neuroscience of beatboxing they finessed in life. That became more dif- (vocally mimicking percussion instruments) and much more. ficult after Willughby’s death. In exchange for an annuity, the family expected Ray to educate Willughby’s children; he was reluc- The Ghosts of Gombe tant. They also resented Ray’s control over Dale Peterson UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS (2018) Willughby’s posthumous legacy. They quar- In July 1969, Ruth Davis — a volunteer at Jane Goodall’s relled over access to Willughby’s collections chimpanzee research centre in Gombe, Tanzania — disappeared. and papers as Ray produced The Ornithology Her body was found below a waterfall six days later. Goodall (1676), The History of Fishes (1686) and The biographer Dale Peterson probes the tragedy and its convoluted History of Insects (1710), based on his joint context in forensic detail, casting back and forth from the centre’s work with his friend. Subsequently, historians primatological findings to the human stories of its researchers. have struggled to divide the credit, sometimes Peterson’s engrossing, sometimes dizzyingly kaleidoscopic narrative favouring one man, sometimes the other. is bookended by nuanced analyses of how Davis might have died, “This game of spot-the-genius is inappro- and the aftershocks that still rock those who knew her best. priate and unhelpful,” writes Birkhead. He invites us to see a scientific life well lived, rich with ideas, adventure and companionship — On Color and, in Willughby’s profound collaboration David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS (2018)
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