Francis Willughby (sometimes spelt Willoughby, Latin: Franciscus Willughbeius) FRS (22 November 1635 – 3 July 1672) was an English ornithologist, ichthyologist and mathematician, and an early student of linguistics and games.
He was born and raised at Middleton Hall, Warwickshire, the only son of an affluent country family. He was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by the mathematician and naturalist John Ray, who became a lifetime friend and colleague, and lived with Willughby after 1662 when Ray lost his livelihood through his refusal to sign the Act of Uniformity. Willughby was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1661, then aged 27.
Willughby, Ray, and others such as John Wilkins were advocates of a new way of studying science, relying on observation and classification, rather than the received authority of Aristotle and the Bible. To this end, Willughby, Ray and their friends undertook a number of journeys to gather information and specimens, initially in England and Wales, but culminating in an extensive tour of continental Europe, visiting museums, libraries and private collections as well as studying local animals and plants. After their continental tour, he and Ray lived and worked mainly at Middleton Hall. Willughby married Emma Barnard in 1668 and the couple had three children.
Willughby had suffered bouts of illness over the years, and eventually died of pleurisy in July 1672, aged 36. His premature death meant that it fell to Ray to complete the works on animals they had jointly planned. In due course, Ray published books on birds, fish and invertebrates, the Ornithologiae Libri Tres, Historia Piscium and Historia Insectorum. The Ornithology was also published in an expanded form in English. The books included innovative and effective ways of classifying animals, and all three were influential in the history of life science, including their effect on subsequent natural history writers and their importance in the development of Linnaeus's binomial nomenclature.
Francis Willughby was born at Middleton Hall, Warwickshire, on 22 November 1635, the only son of Sir Francis Willoughby and his wife Cassandra (née Ridgeway). His grandfathers were Sir Percival Willoughby of Wollaton Hall, and Thomas Ridgeway, 1st Earl of Londonderry. The family were affluent gentry, whose main seat, inherited by Francis, was Wollaton Hall, now in Nottingham. The younger Francis studied at Bishop Vesey's Grammar School, Sutton Coldfield and Trinity College, Cambridge. He appears to have read widely, his library at his death containing an estimated 2,000 books, including literary, historical and heraldic works as well as natural science volumes.
Willughby commenced his studies at Trinity aged 17 as a Fellow-commoner. His tutor was James Duport, who shared the Willughbys' royalist sympathies in the English Civil War. John Ray, then a mathematics fellow at Trinity, arranged for his student Isaac Barrow to teach Willughby that subject. The two became friends, and in 1655 Barrow dedicated his Euclid's Elements to Willughby and two other wealthy fellow pupils.
Although affluent students often left university without a degree, Willughby graduated BA in January 1656, and this was later promoted to MA by seniority in July 1660. In 1657 he joined Gray's Inn, not an unusual step for a man of property who might have to deal with legal disputes. Willughby and Ray had collaborated at Trinity on several "chymistry" projects, including making "sugar of lead" and extracting antimony, and in 1663 Willughby, then aged 27, was elected a founder Fellow of the Royal Society on the nominations of Ray and John Wilkins, who became Master of Trinity College in 1660, and eventually Bishop of Chester. In 1667 Ray was also elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, but was excused the subscription because of his relative poverty.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Francis Bacon had advocated the advancement of knowledge through observation and experiment, rather than relying on the authority of Aristotle and the church. The Royal Society and its members such as Ray, Wilkins and Willughby sought to put the empirical method into practice, including travelling to collect specimens and information. Willughby helped Ray in collecting plants for his botanical work Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam Nascentium (the Cambridge Catalogue), which was published anonymously in February 1660.
Later that year, Ray and Willughby journeyed through northern England to the Lake District, the Isle of Man and the Calf of Man, seeing a Manx shearwater chick at the last site. Willughby then briefly visited the University of Oxford to consult some rare natural history books.
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. 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.
Willughby interviewed Welsh speakers to attempt a systematic study of the language that, although never published, influenced subsequent scholars. 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. 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.
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. Ray and Willughby later visited the West Country together in 1667, returning via Dorset, Hampshire and London.
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".
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, 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. Although all kept journals, most of Willughby's are lost, 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.
The travellers visited Brussels, the University of Leuven, Antwerp, Delft, The Hague and Leiden's university and public library. On 5 June they visited a colony of cormorants, grey herons and spoonbills at Zevenhuizen, and Willughby dissected a spoonbill chick obtained there. The party continued north through Haarlem, Amsterdam and Utrecht before heading to Strasbourg, 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.