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‘No other sign or note than the very order’
Francis Willughby, John Ray and the importance of collecting pictures
Between 1663 and 1665 Francis Willughby FRS collected over 200 drawings of birds and fish. These collections formed the basis of research that culminated in his colleague John Ray's publications Ornithologiae libri tres (1676) and De historia Piscium libri quartuor (1686). This article aims to describe the collections and outline a rough chronology of their formation and use. It also highlights the significance of practices of collecting and arranging drawings. It is suggested here that in Willughby's collection, as in John Wilkins's idea of a philosophical language, where there was ‘no other sign or note than the very order’, pictures acquired meaning through their relationships with other pictures. The article concludes that recent historians have been only half right to claim that pictures enjoyed a privileged position in seventeenth-century scientific culture. The case of Willughby's collections suggests that it was only in the context of a collection that pictures began to take on epistemological significance.
Address for correspondence Nick Grindle, School of Arts and Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Oxford OX3 OBP. ngrindle{at}brookes.ac.uk