Plants and Insects

The fact that Marsili includes his botanical and entomological studies in a miscellaneous sixth volume, which has an array of other material, gives us some indication of his priorities. In Volume VI of Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus Marsili certainly provides the reader with far less botanical information than zoological data. However, that is not to suggest that he had no interest in botany – and certainly a later work, Histoire physique de la mer (Amsterdam, 1725), which though published prior to the Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus was the result of research undertaken in the Mediterranean after his sojourn at the Danube, demonstrates a keen interest in all things botanical. Marsili’s reputation as a botanist was dented somewhat by his decision in Histoire physique de la mer to classify coral as plants, rather than animals – but as Egerton notes, he was not alone in sticking to this classification.[1]

Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus: Observationibus Geographicis, Astronomicis, Hydrographicis, Historicis, Physicis (The Hague & Amsterdam, 1726), vi, p. 53. Alphabetical listing of plants found growing along the course of the Danube.

More recently Marsili’s role as a botanist has been re-evaluated by Ubrizsy Savoia who explores Marsili’s unpublished manuscripts as a rich source of botanical information and points to the fact that Marsili’s library also included a good botanical collection.[2] He was particularly interested in lichens, fungi and mosses but, as Ubrizsy Savoia notes, his rather out-dated views on spontaneous generation ensured that his sometimes valuable botanical work has been overshadowed.[3] It must also be remembered that Marsili was writing prior to the great mid eighteenth-century Linnaean classification (1753) and we see the impact of this on his classification of Danube plants in the above image, where he is careful to cite a number of authorities: the column on the extreme left, ‘Nomina ex historia Taber’ is a reference to Jacobus Theodorus Tabernaemontanus (1520-90), whose Neu vollkommen Kräuter-Buch had first appeared at Frankfurt am Main between 1588 and 1591 but had subsequently been updated with contributions from one of the most famous botanists of the early modern period, Caspar Bauhin (1560-1624), and was edited in 1664 by Caspar Bauhin’s grandson, Hieronymus Bauhin (1637-67). In the second column we see a reference to one of Caspar Bauhin’s most famous works on botanical classification his Pinax Theatri Botanici (Basel, 1623). The third column indicated the habitat of the plants, while the fourth offered specific locations. In all Marsili included the names of c. 700 plants in Volume VI, but unfortunately did not illustrate them.

Marsili’s manuscripts, now at Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, certainly point to an early and keen interest in botany – he was encouraged in his early studies by Lelio Trionfetti (1647-1722), the custodian of the Botanic Garden at Bologna, and continued to correspond with his old tutor on botanical topics throughout his subsequent military career: for example, he told him that he had compiled a plant catalogue, which he collected in Croatia and Slovenia between 1699 and 1700.^[4] Rather ruefully, Marsili also lamented to his former tutor the lack of a botanist on his staff – which may, perhaps, explain the small part the subject plays in Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus.[5] The relatively scanty information Marsili provides for the Danube is nonetheless important because at times it is the earliest source for the flora of a number of areas. As Rožaca et al. point out, the information in Volume VI provides some of the earliest accounts of the flora of Kopački rit Nature Park in Croatia.[6]

Marsili closed the last volume of his magnum opus with a discussion of insects. In his introduction he explained that he was particularly interested in the generation of insects and he certainly would have had ample experience of swarms of mosquitoes and locusts during his military campaigns! As with his botanical section, he included a classificatory table of insects he had seen along the Danube and Tisza rivers. As the above image demonstrates, these he divided into 3 groups: a) terrestrial; b) those that live near water and c) those that live in water. They were further subdivided according to whether they were winged or not, and the number of their wings. Along with the table he includes 80 different insects, some of which he had seen on his travels, such as a locust on the journey to Lipova in 1691 and a butterfly near Belgrade in 1688.[7] Indeed, as Deák points out, Marsili was keen to give personal information about the sightings of insects: regarding invasions of locusts in 1689, 1690 and 1691, he provides the following graphic personal anecdote: ‘the dead bodies of more than a thousand locusts covered the road near Lippa at the time of the autumnal equinox. They were lying in holes in clods of muddy earth. I saw some kind of matter in these holes, which were certainly eggs …’[8]

We know from Georg Christoph Eimmart’s letter to Marsili, dated 24 September 1701, that he had by that stage produced at least 54 engravings of insects for Marsili’s Prodromus.[9] As Ubrizsy Savoia notes, many of Marsili’s plant and insect illustrations were derived from his favourite sources: for example Gessner and Aldrovandi and in the latter we also find ‘perlae’, named because of their pearly wings.[10] Mayflies, dragonflies and antlions were often mistaken for each other and Marsili’s note on a swarm of insects he encountered near the Tisza river suggests that he wasn’t quite sure which insect he was dealing with: ‘Around the 20^th of August in 1688, when I hastened to the camp to captain Karl von Lotharingen in a boat … I saw flying masses of some kind of winged insect on the Danube not far from the mouth of the Tisza’.[11] He was on firmer ground with the ‘culices’ at the end of the image, for he would have had a wealth of experience with mosquitoes during his military campaigns and his travels along the Danube – indeed he mentions in the above image that there was an abundance of them near the island of Tabor on the Danube on 18 June 1696. He also could not go far wrong with the identification of butterflies, and he was in fact the first to describe the butterflies of Vojvodina in Serbia.[12]

TEXT: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library.

SOURCES

Deák, Antal András (ed.), A Duna Fölfedezése. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. Tomus I, A Duna Magyarországi és Szerbiai Szakasza = The Discovery of the Danube. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. Volume I, The Hungarian and Serbian Section of the Danube (Budapest, 2004).

Egerton, Frank N., ‘A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 30: Invertebrate Zoology and Parasitology During the 1700s’, Bulleting of the Ecological Society of America, 89, no. 4 (2008), 407-33.

Jakšic, Predrag, ‘A critical review of the current checklist of butterflies in Serbia’, University Thought: Publications in natural sciences, 9, no. 1 (2019), 1-7.

McConnell, Anita, ‘L.F. Marsigli (1658–1730): early contributions to marine science and hydrography’, International Hydrographic Review, 5, no. 2 (new series) (2004), 6-15.

Rožaca, Vlatko, Dragan Prlićb & Siniša Ozimec, ‘The vascular flora of Kopački rit Nature Park (Croatia) = Vaskularne rastline Naravnega parka Kopački rit (Hrvaška)’, Acta Biologica Slovenica Ljubljana, 61, no. 2 (2018), 47-70.

Russev, Boris K., ‘Ecology, life history and distribution of Palingenia Wngicauda (Olivier) (Ephemeoptera)’, Tijdschrift voor Entomologie, 130 (1987), 109-27.

Stoye, John, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730 : the life and times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, soldier and virtuoso (New Haven & London, 1994).

Ubrizsy Savoia, Andrea, ‘Marsili, a “botanikus”’, Ephemeris Hungarologica, 2, no. 1 (2022), 75-100.

[1] Egerton, Frank N., ‘A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 30: Invertebrate Zoology and Parasitology During the 1700s’, Bulleting of the Ecological Society of America, 89, no. 4 (2008), 416. On Marsili’s ideas about coral see McConnell, Anita, ‘L.F. Marsigli (1658–1730): early contributions to marine science and hydrography’, International Hydrographic Review, 5, no. 2 (new series) (2004), 6-15.

[2] Ubrizsy Savoia, Andrea, ‘Marsili, a “botanikus”’, Ephemeris Hungarologica, 2, no. 1 (2022), 78.

[3] Ibid., 76.

[4] Stoye, John, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730 : the life and times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, soldier and virtuoso (New Haven & London, 1994), p. 193. This is presumably the manuscript catalogue ‘Catalogus itinerarius, hoc est Syllabus universalis plantarum et herbarum quas per Croatiam, Bosniam, Sclavoniam, Hungariae inferioris et Walachiae portionem euntibus nobis, flora colligendas in aprico posuit sponte nascentes, anno MDCC’. On this see Ubrizsy Savoia, ‘Marsili, a “botanikus”’, 80.

[5] Stoye, John, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730, p. 193.

[6] Rožaca, Vlatko, Dragan Prlićb & Siniša Ozimec, ‘The vascular flora of Kopački rit Nature Park (Croatia) = Vaskularne rastline Naravnega parka Kopački rit (Hrvaška)’, Acta Biologica Slovenica Ljubljana, 61, no. 2 (2018), 47.

[7] Stoye, John, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730, p. 225.

[8] Deák, Antal András (ed.), A Duna Fölfedezése. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. Tomus I, A Duna Magyarországi és Szerbiai Szakasza = The Discovery of the Danube. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. Volume I, The Hungarian and Serbian Section of the Danube (Budapest, 2004), p. 156.

[9] Ibid., p. 121. Quoting BUB Mss. Di Marsigli Vol. 79. II. Nürnberg. September 24. 1701. Eimmart’s letter to Marsili.

[10] Ubrizsy Savoia, ‘Marsili, a “botanikus”’, p. 90, fn 35.

[11] Deák, The Discovery of the Danube, p. 156. Russev, Boris K., ‘Ecology, life history and distribution of Palingenia Wngicauda (Olivier) (Ephemeoptera)’, Tijdschrift voor Entomologie, 130 (1987), 109, suggests that this was a swarm of mayflies.

[12] Jakšic, Predrag, ‘A critical review of the current checklist of butterflies in Serbia’, University Thought: Publications in natural sciences, 9, no. 1 (2019), 1.