“Nearly Resembling the Live Birds”: Collecting and Collating for the Reformation of Natural History

Abstract

This chapter examines the plates in Francis Willughby’s Ornithology and unearths the sources used by the engravers to produce plates that nearly resembled the life, to use John Ray’s phrase. While Ray asserted he was not repeating textual error put forth by his predecessors, such as Gessner and Aldrovandi, he used their illustrations as the basis for his own as well as drawings of live and dead birds that he collected. By uncovering the original sources for the illustrations, this chapter argues that greater value was placed on recognizable, printed images than on drawings collected by the author. This conclusion leads to a larger argument about the perceived truth-content of printed natural historical images in the seventeenth century.