The natural historian Francis Willughby (1635–1672) is one of the lesser-known figures of the heroic age of English science in the late seventeenth century—the age of Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and the establishment of the Royal Society. His close friend and intellectual partner, John Ray, is the subject of a good—if rather hagiographic and out-of-date—book by Charles Raven, but Willughby, an early member of the Royal Society, has largely been forgotten by biographers, possibly due to his relatively short lifespan. Now comes ornithologist Tim Birkhead with an attempt to fill this gap, an attempt whose enthusiasm is even manifest in its title.
The Wonderful Mr Willughby is an example of a type of book that once roamed over the historiography of science like a mighty tyrannosaur and now seems headed for a gradual extinction. This is the reverent study of a “founder of the field” by a current practitioner. The strength of these books, and certainly of The Wonderful Mr Willughby, is their technical knowledge. Their weakness is their lack of awareness of historical context or historiographic interpretations. The idea of identifying “the first true ornithologist” is not one that would even occur to most modern historians of science, smacking as it does of a teleological, “Whiggish” approach to the discipline. Birkhead identifies right and wrong approaches to science in a way that many modern historians of science would consider anachronistic. There is also the risk of a narrow approach to Willughby's career focusing on Birkhead's own area of expertise, ornithology, where Willughby was interested in a wide range of areas, including insects (in the seventeenth-century sense of small invertebrates), fish, and game, which he attempted to systematically classify. Although Birkhead does devote significant attention to non-ornithological aspects of Willughby's intellectual project, one gets the feeling that Birkhead is mostly going through these areas of Willughby's interest out of a sense of obligation.
The Wonderful Mr Willughby is also marked by a much greater authorial presence than is characteristic of scholarly work. Much of the book is taken up with Birkhead's reminiscences of following in Willughby's footsteps in Britain and on the Continent. He conveys a sense of excitement in the recovery of Willughby's collections and the examination of Willughby's texts. Birkhead's scientific expertise gives him several advantages, such as the ability to identify birds from Willughby's descriptions and evaluate Willughby's strategies and interpretations. The last chapter of the main text is devoted to a campaign to have the European honey buzzard, which Willughby distinguished from the common buzzard, renamed “Willughby's buzzard.” In short, Birkhead, the author of several highly praised books on birds, has written a book whose primary audience is people interested in birds, rather than people interested in the history of Restoration science.
The problem with this approach is that the reader gets little feel for Willughby in the Restoration context, practicing his science in a time of intellectual and social transformation. What did Willughby think he was doing? How did his career relate to the historiographical issues of Restoration science? The idea of a “scientific revolution,” fiercely contested in the world of academic historians of science, is simply assumed to apply here. Any serious discussion of Willughby's colleague John Ray, the author of The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), would include discussion of his religion; Willughby's religion, like his politics, might as well not exist for Birkhead.
One appealing feature is that Birkhead carries the narrative past the date of Willughby's death, both in dealing with his family (his widow married East India nabob Josiah Child, which proved a disaster) and his intellectual legacy, which mostly appeared courtesy of Ray, who managed the posthumous publication of Historia Piscium (1686), on fish, and Historia Insectorum (1710), on insects. Although Birkhead has respect for Ray, it is clear that he thinks that Ray's reputation (particularly as promoted by Raven) has unjustly cast a shadow over Willughby's. (His attitude towards Ray is, however, much milder than that of one member of the family of Willughby's modern descendants, who views Ray as a poacher of the reputation deserved by Willughby.) Curiously, Birkhead does not ever detail the claim made in his title that Willughby was the “first true ornithologist.” Certainly, he drew from earlier writers of natural history, including Ulisse Aldrovandi and Konrad Gessner. The idea of a “first true ornithologist” seems to stem from Willughby's rejection of the tendency of earlier writers like Aldrovandi and Gesner to include information about an animal's cultural associations along with its physical characteristics, habits, and life cycle.
Aiming a text at a popular rather than a scholarly audience does have its advantages, even in addition to the strikingly reasonable price. With both black-and-white illustrations and several sections of color photographs, The Wonderful Mr Willughby is lavishly illustrated far beyond the standard for most modern historical monographs produced by academic presses. The index and bibliography are both good. It is not a true scholarly biography of Francis Willughby, but it will do until one comes along.
