THE SICILIAN
Sometime in the first two or three years of the eighteenth century two pioneering botanists collected a specimen of a large, yellow, daisy-like flower they found growing high on the slopes of Mount Etna. The daisy had taken root in the volcanic clinker that covers the mountain’s upper slopes. In this location, from time to time, it must have been scorched by passing lava flows and wreathed in clouds of the acidic gasses spouting from the volcanic vents that scar the mountainside. And yet it prospered.
Given the hardship that it suffered in its natural habitat, perhaps it is not surprising that the Sicilian daisy survived the sixteen-day journey by donkey and sailing ship to England. Once ashore, Francisco Cupani and William Sherard, the two acquisitive botanists, delivered it and the other specimens they had collected to Badminton House near Chipping Sodbury.
Badminton was then, as it is now, the home of the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort. Mary Duchess of Beaufort was the sponsor of Cupani and Sherard’s annual plant-collecting trips. The Badminton gardeners, and there must have been quite a few of them for the gardens and grounds extended to fifty-two thousand acres, took charge of the Sicilian daisy.
Time, not for the first or last time in this narrative, now folds in upon itself and “in no time at all” the Duchess had sent some seeds to Jacob Bobart the Younger. Bobart was the superintendent botanist at the Oxford Physic Garden. His Father, Bobart the Elder (1599-1680) had been the first superintendent of the Oxford Physic Garden.
Bobart the Younger gave the seeds of the Sicilian Daisy into the care of his assistants for he was busy at that time perpetrating a fraud.
ii. Bobart’s Dragon
In the early days of 1704 Bobart found a large dead rat in the Physic Garden. He must have been bored for he expended a great deal of time and effort working on the rat. First he surgically altered its head and tail. Next he loosened the skin on the rat’s flanks and then, thrusting sharp sticks into the sides of the rat, stretched and trimmed the skin so that the resulting flaps resembled the wings of a bat. After this he dried the whole confection in the sun until it was utterly desiccated.
A few weeks later Bobart presented the mummified rat at the monthly meeting of the learned, and not so learned, members of the Oxford scientific community. The men ~ for there were no learned women in Oxford at the time ~ identified the dry-cured rat as the mummified remains of a Dragon.
If there were any of the Oxford scientists not convinced by the desiccated rat they kept their doubts to themselves. The learned conclave collectively wrote a letter that included a sketch of the Dragon and sent it to Doctor Antonio Magliabechi, the then librarian to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Magliabechi, anxious to promote the significance of his work in the great library, took up his pen and wrote a learned paper on the Dragon. In due course copies of Magliabechi’s paper were circulated among the scientifically minded members of the noble families of Europe. As a result, a number of these scientifically minded poets, or poetically inclined scientists, composed celebratory verses on the discovery of this link to a fabled past.
After a while Bobart, who had not expected to be so successful in his prank, confessed to his learned colleagues. The scientific community in Oxford, which must have been embarrassed did not, however, take Bobart to task. Rather than make a fuss and draw attention to their gullibility they laughed and had Bobart’s counterfeit Dragon installed as an exhibit in the museum of the Oxford University Schools of Anatomy.
The past then is an all too familiar country. In the opening years of the 18th Century a commoner might be hung for stealing a sheep or thrashed for mocking his masters but for duping the great and the good Jacob Bobart the Younger, Horti Praefectus of the Oxford Physic Garden, earned a round of applause and a place in the history books.
iii. Bobart’s Legacy
In the end, however, Bobart got his comeuppance. William Shippen who was first Tutor, then Fellow, then Principal of Brasenose College was one of the great and the good fooled by Bobart’s Dragon. In the early summer of 1719 Shippen, who was then serving a five-year stint as Vice Chancellor of Oxford University insisted that Bobart, who was dying, resign from his post as Professor of Botany and superintendent of the Oxford Physic Garden and rise from his sick-bed and vacate his lodgings.
William Sherard, that same Sherard who had collected the Sicilian Daisy on Etna and who would soon endow the Oxford Chair of Botany which bears his name to this day, observed this bad-behaviour and wrote to the University faculty saying,
I am surprised the vice-chancellor hath obliged Mr. Bobart to resign his place... they ought to have let him spend the short remainder of his time in the garden.
Bobart the Younger died on 28 December 1719 and was buried two days later beside his father, Bobart the Elder, in the graveyard of St Peter in the East. If, however, you go there now looking for a memorial to Bobart the Younger, you will be disappointed.
The church of St Peter in the East served as a Chapel for the students of St Edmund’s Hall ~ today one of the largest Oxford Colleges and known affectionately as Teddy Hall ~ until 1682 when a new chapel was built in the College grounds. St Peter in the East dates back to the 11th Century. The Lady Chapel was built in 1220. The Nave, Chancel and Crypt were built between 1130 and 1160. The North Aisle was added in the 13th century, the tower in the 14th and the Vestry and a small chapel to St Thomas were added in the 16th century. In 1965, however, the search for knowledge trumped the pursuit of divine grace and the Church was converted into a library for the students and faculty of Teddy Hall. In the process the graves and monuments of the two Bobarts and the rest of the graveyard were lost.
The grave of Robert Shippen the avenging bailiff of Bobart the Younger’s last days, however, is easy to find. Shippen is buried in the chapel at Brasenose College, he is commemorated with an epitaph by Frewin and a memorial bust by somebody else. He is remembered, by those few who remember him at all, as a dutiful and dedicated academic administrator.
If you seek a memorial for Bobart the Younger, a fellow of infinite jest and a great scientist, you need look no further than his letters many of which are preserved in the Library of the Royal Society and in the British Museum. You might also inspect his interleaved and copiously annotated copy of Bauhin’s Pinax kept in the botanical department of the Natural History Museum on Cromwell Road in London. Or you could reference the botanical genus Bobartia named in honour of the two Bobarts, father and son, by Linnaeus in the Amœnitates Academicæ.
These are all fitting memorials to a useful and well-spent life. As long as scholarship and the history of science shall be valued these links will remind us of Bobart the Younger. But, for the non-scientifically minded, a category that includes the present author, wishing to find a memorial for Bobart we need only turn to the Sicilian Daisy for most of the people who live in Great Britain are familiar with it even if we do not know that we are.
iv. The Promiscuous Weed
While Bobart the Younger was tweaking the nose of the Oxford scientists the Sicilian Daisy had fruited and finding no convenient volcanos on The High or along the Iffley Road, made do with the dry and dusty corners of the Physic Garden and there it lived, in quiet seclusion, by permission of the Horti Praefectus of the Garden, for the next thirty years.
From what we now understand of the daisy’s resilience and astonishing reproductive powers, the gardeners of the Oxford Physic Garden must have struggled to keep the daisy under control rather than labouring to keep it alive. They did not however dismiss it as a weed and, in the early 1730s, Johann Jacob Dillenius, the then Sherardian Professor of Botany at the University of Oxford, sent some samples he found living in the cracks in the walls of the Physic Garden to Carl Linnaeus a young Swedish botanist who had recently started to give lectures in Botany at Uppsala University. Our daisy was duly classified and given a name – senecio squalidus - by the father of modern taxonomy himself.
Senecio squalidus is a member of the Asteracea family and produces up to 10,000 fruits each year. Each fruit is about 2mm in length, contains a single seed and is tipped with fine, silky hairs, very like the fluffy headed seeds of a Dandelion to which it is related. The slightest breeze will lift and carry-off these fruits to pastures new. Oxford Ragwort, however, seems to have been imprisoned within the walls of the Oxford Physic Garden.
For more than sixty years senecio squlidus remained in the Garden. The first edition of John Sibthorp’s exhaustive and scientifically rigorous account of the Plants of the City of Oxford published in 1793 did not include the Sicilian. Given it’s promiscuity if it had been out and about in Oxford, Sibthorp could hardly have missed it. Seven years later, however, James Edward Smith came to town.
Smith was the son of a Norwich wool merchant. He had studied botany under John Hope an early teacher of Linnaen taxonomy at the University of Edinburgh. He moved to London in 1783 to continue his studies and became a friend of Sir Joseph Banks. Banks was offered Carl Linnaeus’ entire collection of books, manuscripts and specimens following the death of hyis son Carl Linnaeus the Younger. Banks declined the purchase, but Smith borrowed the money from his father and in 1784 bought the entire collection for £1,000 ~ about £200,000 in today’s money ~ and promptly founded the Linnaen Society.
The collection included the original samples and notes for classification of senicio squalidus sent to Carl Linnaeus the Elder by Johann Jacob Dillenius. In 1800 Smith officially identified as senecio squalidus a plant known as Oxford Ragwort that was by then common in the streets of Oxford.
Not for the first time nor, we can be sure, for the last, the dusty notoriously inhospitable buildings of the Oxford colleges had offered food and lodgings to a promiscuous weed.
v. Etna come to Oxfordshire
The seeds of plants that take to the air need to land in a hospitable environment if they are to take root. The author, who is far from being a botanist, concludes that any airborne Oxford Ragwort seeds that blew beyond the boundaries of the city fell to earth in the rich and verdant water-meadows of Oxfordshire and promptly died. This situation might have continued indefinitely had not the railways come to Oxford in the 1850s.
Before we follow the Sicilian on its journey to the North, we might take a moment to marvel that less than one hundred and fifty years separated the beginning of the age of steam from Antonio Magliabechi and the early Oxford scientists agreeing that Bobart’s rat was a mummified Dragon.