John Ray
born Nov. 29, 1627, Black Notley, Essex, Eng.
died Jan. 17, 1705, Black Notley
leading 17th-century English naturalist and
botanist who contributed significantly to
progress in taxonomy. His enduring legacy to
botany was the establishment of species as the
ultimate unit of taxonomy.
Life
Ray was the son of the village blacksmith in
Black Notley and attended the grammar school in
nearby Braintree. In 1644, with the aid of a
fund that had been left in trust to support
needy scholars at the University of Cambridge,
he matriculated at one of the colleges there,
St. Catherine’s Hall, and moved to Trinity
College in 1646. Ray had come to Cambridge at
the right time for one with his talents, for he
found a circle of friends with whom he pursued
anatomical and chemical studies. He also
progressed well in the curriculum, taking his
bachelor’s degree in 1648 and being elected to a
fellowship at Trinity the following year; during
the next 13 years he lived quietly in his
collegiate cloister.
Ray’s string of fortunate circumstances ended
with the Restoration. Although he was never an
excited partisan, he was thoroughly Puritan in
spirit and refused to take the oath that was
prescribed by the Act of Uniformity. In 1662 he
lost his fellowship. Prosperous friends
supported him during the subsequent 43 years
while he pursued his career as a naturalist.
That career had already begun with the
publication of his first work in 1660, a catalog
of plants growing around Cambridge. After he had
exhausted the Cambridge area as a subject for
his studies, Ray began to explore the rest of
Britain. An expedition in 1662 to Wales and
Cornwall with the naturalist Francis Willughby
was a turning point in his life. Willughby and
Ray agreed to undertake a study of the complete
natural history of living things, with Ray
responsible for the plant kingdom and Willughby
the animal.
The first fruit of the agreement, a tour of
the European continent lasting from 1663 to
1666, greatly extended Ray’s first-hand
knowledge of flora and fauna. Back in England,
the two friends set to work on their appointed
task. In 1670 Ray produced a Catalogus Plantarum
Angliae (“Catalog of English Plants”). Then in
1672 Willughby suddenly died, and Ray took up
the completion of Willughby’s portion of their
project. In 1676 Ray published F. Willughbeii .
. . Ornithologia (The Ornithology of F.
Willughby . . .) under Willughby’s name, even
though Ray had contributed at least as much as
Willughby. Ray also completed F. Willughbeii . .
. de Historia Piscium (1685; “History of Fish”),
with the Royal Society, of which Ray was a
fellow, financing its publication.
Important publications
Ray had never interrupted his research in
botany. In 1682 he had published a Methodus
Plantarum Nova (revised in 1703 as the Methodus
Plantarum Emendata . . . ), his contribution to
classification, which insisted on the taxonomic
importance of the distinction between
monocotyledons and dicotyledons, plants whose
seeds germinate with one leaf and those with
two, respectively. Ray’s enduring legacy to
botany was the establishment of species as the
ultimate unit of taxonomy. On the basis of the
Methodus, he constructed his masterwork, the
Historia Plantarum, three huge volumes that
appeared between 1686 and 1704. After the first
two volumes, he was urged to compose a complete
system of nature. To this end he compiled brief
synopses of British and European plants, a
Synopsis Methodica Avium et Piscium (published
posthumously, 1713; “Synopsis of Birds and
Fish”), and a Synopsis Methodica Animalium
Quadrupedum et Serpentini Generis (1693;
“Synopsis of Quadrupeds”). Much of his final
decade was spent on a pioneering investigation
of insects, published posthumously as Historia
Insectorum.
In all this work, Ray contributed to the
ordering of taxonomy. Instead of a single
feature, he attempted to base his systems of
classification on all the structural
characteristics, including internal anatomy. By
insisting on the importance of lungs and cardiac
structure, he effectively established the class
of mammals, and he divided insects according to
the presence or absence of metamorphoses.
Although a truly natural system of taxonomy
could not be realized before the age of Darwin,
Ray’s system approached that goal more than the
frankly artificial systems of his
contemporaries. He was one of the great
predecessors who made possible Carolus Linnaeus’
contributions in the following century.
Nor was this the sum of his work. In the
1690s Ray also published three volumes on
religion. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the
Works of the Creation (1691), an essay in
natural religion that called on the full range
of his biological learning, was his most popular
and influential book. It argued that the
correlation of form and function in organic
nature demonstrates the necessity of an
omniscient creator. This argument from design,
common to most of the leading scientists of the
17th century, implied a static view of nature
that was distinctly different from the
evolutionary ideas of the early and mid-19th
century. Still working on his Historia
Insectorum, John Ray died at the age of 77.
Richard S. Westfall
Ed.
