John Ray

English naturalist and theologian

• Born: November 29, 1627
• Birthplace: Black Notley, near Braintree, Essex, England
• Died: January 17, 1705
• Place of death: Black Notley, near Braintree, Essex, England

Devising important early classifications of vertebrate, reptile, and insect species, as well as of all known plants, Ray made significant contributions to the English tradition of natural history. He also published a major, highly successful tract in natural theology.

Early Life

John Ray’s parents were Roger Ray, a blacksmith, and Elizabeth Ray, whose use of herbal medications in healing may have inspired John’s interest in plants. Ray acquired a grammar school education in Braintree, where he received a grounding in Latin. He obtained a scholarship to Catherine Hall, Cambridge University, in 1644 and two years later transferred to Trinity College. He concentrated on languages, mastering Latin and gaining academic distinction in Greek and Hebrew, and he earned a B.A. in 1647 or 1648.

During Ray’s time at the university, the Cambridge Platonists were quite prominent on campus, and their theology, as well as scriptural evidence, justified the study of nature, or even made that study a religious duty. Exposure to these ideas had a lifelong effect on Ray’s beliefs. In 1649, Ray was elected a fellow at Trinity, soon after which he began to study botany. He earned an M.A. in 1651 and was appointed a lecturer in three disciplines, Greek (1651 and 1656), mathematics (1653), and humanities (1655). During these years, Ray developed a circle of friends who observed dissections in the rooms of John Nidd. In the late 1650’s, Ray held several administrative positions at the university, and he was ordained in 1660.

Ray left Cambridge in 1662, because he could not in good conscience take the Oath of Uniformity. During his early years at Cambridge, Ray had met Francis Willughby (1635-1672), with whom he made several trips to collect specimens in the British Isles and on the Continent during the 1660’s. A member of a wealthy noble family, Willughby supported Ray financially after he left Cambridge, bequeathing him an annual stipend.

Life’s Work

Ray was a prolific author whose works reveal the synthesis of his talent in languages, his study of plants and later animals, and his religious convictions. The original plan was for him to write botanical works and for Willughby to author zoological works. Ray’s first published piece was a catalog of Cambridge plants (1660), which listed the species in alphabetical order. In this catalog, Ray provided summaries of the names given to the plants by previous authors, clarifications and corrections of earlier descriptions, and both English and Latin terminology. At the end of the book, he suggested a scheme of classification, a subject that became increasingly important in his work. Ten years later, he published a catalog of all of the English plant species, followed in 1672 by a catalog of foreign plants.

Ray’s skill with languages resulted in several works, including Collection of English Words (1673), which listed terms for insects and birds, and Dictionariolum trilinguae (1675; little trilingual dictionary), an attempt to clarify the terminology employed to describe plants and animals, by providing terms in Latin, Greek, and English. Clarifying terms helped Ray to create new classifications of species. In his first work on botanical classification, Methodus plantarum nova (1682; new method of plants), he departed from custom and based his botanical classifications on several reproductive parts, not just one. Moreover, he divided plants into three major groups—trees, shrubs and herbs—and then subdivided these groups according to characteristics other than their reproductive parts. For example, his classification of herbaceous species consisted of two groups—those with imperfect flowers and those with perfect flowers; the perfect flower group with large seeds contained what were later called monocotyledons and dicotyledons.

The Methodus plantarum nova was a prelude to Ray’s greatest botanical work, the massive three-volume Historia plantarum generalis (1686-1704; history of plants). Contained in this work’s first volume was an overview of botany in which Ray described the many parts of plants, provided practical information on the growing of plants and their uses as food and medications, described various habitats, discussed plant diseases and their cures, and even speculated on the possibility of the “transmutation” of plants, accepting it only in plants that were not clearly distinct species. Descriptions of plants arranged according to the classification of the Methodus plantarum nova followed. When Ray revised his catalog of English flora in 1690, he dropped the alphabetical listing and arranged the plant families according to his new system of classification.

Unlike his botanical works, Ray’s zoological works were not comprehensive, though they remain historically important. Willughby had started works on birds and fish, and after his death, Ray arranged and enlarged the information Willughby had already gathered. As he had done in his books on plants, Ray also collected and critiqued earlier zoological material, clarified its terminology, and reduced the number of distinct species. Again departing from tradition, Ray classified animals not by their habitat or their medical uses but by their external characteristics or morphology. Moreover, as in his botanical studies, Ray took pains with nomenclature and rejected many imaginary beasts such as the unicorn. His goal was a work that enabled its reader to name and identify species.

Ray’s works reveal that he investigated the animal kingdom in a rigorous manner. During his continental travels in the 1660’s, he attended physiology lectures at Padua, and in 1669, he performed a dissection of a porpoise, published later in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1672. Ray turned his attention to animals and reptiles in the early 1690’s and wrote Synopsis Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpentini Generis (1693; synopsis of the types of quadrupedal animals and serpents), which generally followed Aristotle’s classification system.

As in his botanical endeavors, Ray searched for a natural basis of animal classification and grouped animals in the first instance based on whether they had lungs or gills. Those with lungs, he divided into groups according to heart structure. He divided live-bearing hairy quadrupeds into ungulates (hoofed animals) and unguiculates (clawed animals), a challenge to the long-standing Aristotelian division into three classes. Ray’s final great work on animals was Historia insectorum (1710; history of insects), which covered the invertebrates and devoted extensive chapters to butterflies and moths.

Ray wrote many other kinds of works, including travel accounts, sermons, and a late work on geology. Toward the end of his life, he published several tracts on natural or physico-theology. Of note is The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691), a best-seller that went through four editions. In it, he argued that the nature of living beings can be explained only by attributing design and purpose to them and that the study of nature reveals the hand of God. Ray continued to prepare new editions of previous works and to write until he died in 1705.

Significance

The life and works of Ray provide an example of an empirical and critical spirit. The goal of all of his works on the classification of plants and animals was to present a natural system, one in which related species were not classified separately and unrelated species were not classified together. In contrast to an artificial system, in which classification rests on one characteristic, a natural system groups species according to the whole. The botanical classification of the Methodus plantarum nova contained thirty-seven main groups. When this system of classification gained recognition on the Continent, Ray became embroiled in a controversy with two major continental botanists, Rivinus (Augustus Quirnus Bachman; 1652-1725) and Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708), both of whom published much simpler, artificial systems based only on the parts of flowers.

Ray’s empiricism, however, seems to have led to a great difficulty in the theory of classification. He accepted John Locke’s argument that, because all physical objects were known only through sensations, their essences could not be known. This argument, however, undermines the aim of natural classification, which is to classify species by their essence. In the eighteenth century, artificial classifications prevailed, given authority by the work of Carolus Linnaeus.

Bibliography

Cram, David. “Birds, Beasts, and Fishes Versus Bats, Mongrels, and Hybrids: The Publication History of John Ray’s Dictionariolum (1675).” Paradigm 6 (1991). Discusses Ray’s contribution to the correction and systematizing of species’ names and classification. Includes some illustrations from the work.

Ford, Brian J. “Shining Through the Centuries: John Ray’s Life and Legacy—A Report of the Meeting ’John Ray and His Successors.’” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 54, no. 1 (2000): 5-21. Overview of a conference containing a description of Ray’s contributions to natural history tradition and its subsequent history. Also places his natural theology in its contemporary context and outlines its influence in the nineteenth century.

Gillespie, Neal C. “Natural History, Natural Theology, and Social Order: John Ray and the ’Newtonian Ideology.’” Journal of the History of Biology 20 (1987): 1-49. Examines how natural theology and natural history were united at the end of the seventeenth century.

Kusukawa, S. “The Historia Piscium (1686).” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 54, no. 2 (2000): 179-197. Discusses how the work on fish departed from earlier approaches to their identification and classification. Also presents details on the difficulties of its publication.

Raven, Charles E. John Ray, Naturalist: His Life and Works. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1950. Still the only book-length biography of Ray, useful for descriptions of his works, though old-fashioned methodologically.

Sloan, Phillip R. “John Locke, John Ray, and the Problem of the Natural System.” Journal of the History of Biology 5 (1972): 1-53. Provides details of Ray’s dispute with Rivinus in the context of the conflict between natural classification, which Ray supported, and artificial classification, placing the dispute in the context of the seventeenth century debate.