After attending the grammar school at Braintree, John Ray entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1644, graduating Bachelor of Arts in 1648 and Master of Arts in 1651.
Gallery of John Ray
Trumpington St, Cambridge CB2 1RL, United Kingdom
In 1644, with the aid of a fund that had been left in trust to support needy scholars at the University of Cambridge, John Ray matriculated at one of the colleges there, Saint Catherine’s Hall.
Career
Gallery of John Ray
1693
Woodcut frontispiece of John Ray.
Gallery of John Ray
1820
John Ray. Stipple engraving by J. Roffe, 1820, after Mary Beale.
Gallery of John Ray
John Ray. Line engraving by W. H. Lizars after Mary Beale.
Gallery of John Ray
John Ray. Line engraving after W. Faithorne.
Gallery of John Ray
Portrait of John Ray from the catalog of portraits, paintings and sculpture at the Natural History Museum, London.
Gallery of John Ray
Portrait of John Ray by an unknown artist.
Gallery of John Ray
John Ray. Line engraving after Mary Beale.
Gallery of John Ray
John Ray, Sir William Temple, and Sir Christopher Wren.
After attending the grammar school at Braintree, John Ray entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1644, graduating Bachelor of Arts in 1648 and Master of Arts in 1651.
In 1644, with the aid of a fund that had been left in trust to support needy scholars at the University of Cambridge, John Ray matriculated at one of the colleges there, Saint Catherine’s Hall.
John Ray, Sir William Temple, and Sir Christopher Wren.
Connections
Friend: Isaac Barrow
Isaac Barrow (October 1630 – 4 May 1677) was an English Christian theologian and mathematician who is generally given credit for his early role in the development of infinitesimal calculus.
(Perfect and sinless Holiness is not attainable by mortal ...)
Perfect and sinless Holiness is not attainable by mortal Men in this present Life, and therefore God is pleased to accept of sincerity of Obedience instead of Perfection; and so we may define Holiness, so far as it is attainable in this imperfect state, to be a sincere and constant desire and endeavor to obey God in all his Commands. More than this, we cannot perform, and less than this God will not accept.
John Ray was a 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.
Background
John Ray was born on November 29, 1627, in Black Notley, Essex, England. He may have acquired his interest in science during his early years at Black Notley, where his father, Roger Ray, was a blacksmith and his mother, Elizabeth, attained local eminence for her skills as an amateur herbalist and medical practitioner. He acknowledged that he had been devoted to the study of botany since his earliest years. Until 1670, he used to write his name as John Wray. After that he used 'Ray', after having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him.
Education
John Ray 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, Saint 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. He received his Master of Arts in 1651.
An academic career unfolded smoothly during the Commonwealth and Protectorate; John Ray was elected fellow of Trinity in 1649, and during the next decade he held college teaching positions in Greek, mathematics, and humanities, as well as other minor offices. This course was suddenly interrupted in 1662 with the Act of Uniformity. Ray refused to take the oath required by the Act and thus elected to sacrifice his fellowship and leave Cambridge.
Subsequently, Ray’s work was supported by the generous patronage of his younger Cambridge contemporary Francis Willughby. For more than a decade, Willughby’s estates at Middleton Hall, Warwickshire, and Wollaton Hall, Nottingham, were the bases for Ray’s expeditions throughout Britain. Ray and Willughby became close collaborators, their most ambitious journey (1663-1666) being through the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy, with short visits by Ray to Sicily and Malta. The return journey, through France and Switzerland, included a long stay in Montpellier, where Ray formed one of his main scientific friendships, with Martin Lister, who also was making a Continental tour.
Upon his return to England, Ray was elected fellow of the Royal Society on 7 November 1667; he very seldom attended the meetings, however, although some of his letters to Oldenburg were published in the Phylosophical Transactions. Upon Oldenburg’s death, Ray was offered the secretaryship of the Society hut refused it, probably for a mixture of conscientious and temperamental reasons; he found an obscure existence most convenient for his work as a naturalist. The close partnership with Willughby ended with the latter’s death in 1672. For the next 10 years, Ray concentrated on preparing books based on Willughby's material; these were Ornithologia (1676) and Historia piscium (1686). In Ornithologia, 230 species of birds personally observed by the authors are described and classified: the book laid the foundations of scientific ornithology.
In 1974 Ray sent a paper to the Royal Society which laid the foundation for his classification of plants. The paper, "A Discourse on the Seeds of Plants," distinguished between plants with a single seed leaf and those with two such leaves. A second paper by Ray, also sent to the Royal Society in 1674, laid down the definition of a species in terms of the structural qualities alone. This was a highly original approach which was to bear fruit later.
Ray's first serious essay in classification, the Methodus plantarum nova was published in 1682. Following the publication of the Methodus, Ray decided to apply the principles he had discovered to a large-scale study of all the plants of the world. This occupied him for the rest of his life and was published in three volumes: Historia generalis plantarum (1686, 1688, 1704), each of about 1,000 pages. The book described about 6,100 species which he knew himself, but it was handicapped in its general appeal by having been written in Latin and having no illustrations.
Still inspired by Willughby's interest in zoology, Ray wrote an important work on mammals and reptiles (Synopsis animalium quadrupedum et serpentini generis, 1693) in which he rejected Aristotle's classification and introduced the names ungulates (animals in which the toes are covered with horny hoofs) and unguiculates (animals in which the toes are bare but carry nails). In about 1690 Ray began to collect insects, mainly Lepidoptera. He recorded his observations on some 300 species in Historia insectorum (1710), which was never completed and was published posthumously.
One of Ray's most famous books, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, was first published in 1691. In it Ray turns from the preliminary task of identifying, describing, and classifying to that of interpreting the significance of physical and physiological processes and the relations between form and function. He not only drew attention to these fascinating subjects but argued that this was a proper exercise of man's faculties and a legitimate field for Christian inquiry. He died at Black Notley on January 17, 1705.
Sometimes called the "father of natural history," John Ray was the most influential natural historian of early modern Britain. He was a leader in the establishment of an expert community of naturalists who had as their central aim the firsthand observation of creation and its systematic organization. Through his efforts, a technical vocabulary for communicating the increasingly specialized material for standardized plant descriptions was stabilized, and many of these terms are still used in botany. An array of observational practices, methodological techniques, and textual protocols were also introduced by Ray and became culturally dominant within the discipline. Ray's natural theology ultimately made the study of natural history an acceptable and pious practice for Anglican gentlemen and for Anglican divines. The Ray Society, founded in 1844, was named in his honor.
In 1660 Ray was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church.
Politics
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 due to this.
Views
A devout Christian, Ray expounded his belief in "natural theology," the doctrine that the wisdom and power of God could be understood by studying His creation, the natural world. This doctrine can be traced back to the Bible, but Ray expressed it so fully and clearly that he started a long tradition of natural theology in England and abroad.
In two major works written late in his life, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691) and Three Physico-Theological Discourses (1692), Ray expounded his views of the creation, organization, and eventual fate of the Earth and the life on it. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation was especially popular and influential; it was translated into several foreign languages, and was reprinted for over fifty years after its publication. Both of these books were based on sermons Ray had delivered at Cambridge. Such deep religious feeling may seem out of place in scientific writing today, but Ray's work actually represented a huge advance for science. Whereas many medieval and later theologians had taught that the natural world distracted people from salvation and should be avoided, Ray affirmed powerfully that Nature was a worthy subject for study and reason, and that such activity was pleasing to God. Ray cautioned against blind acceptance of authorities: in The Wisdom of God, he wrote: "Let it not suffice to be book-learned, to read what others have written and to take upon trust more falsehood than truth, but let us ourselves examine things as we have opportunity, and converse with Nature as well as with books."
Also, because of Ray's belief in natural theology, he spent a great deal of time pondering the relationships of organismal form to function. Living things showed adaptations to their environments, which for Ray were signs of God's design and hence worthy of study. Unlike Linnaeus, who focused almost exclusively on classification for its own sake, Ray began to use classification to address questions in physiology, function, and behavior. The Wisdom of God is filled with excellent observations and questions about organisms' behavior and function.
Ray's theories about fossils were mixed, but he always supported the theory that fossils were once living organisms. Some fossils, perhaps, had been formed in the Biblical flood, when "the fountains of the deep" had washed marine organisms onto the land through great fissures. However, Ray did not believe that all fossils, or even most fossils, had been formed in this way. Ray's scientific objections to the Deluge - that fossil were found in discrete beds, and that a flood would have washed fossils away from land, not onto land - echo those of Leonardo da Vinci over a century earlier. Rather, Ray explained most fossils with this hypothesis: during the creation of the world, the Earth had been covered by a single ocean, where the fossil organisms had once lived, which had slowly receded to expose the land. Other fossils might have been formed when the ocean floor was raised by "subterraneous Fires and Flatuses" (that is, volcanoes and earthquakes), although Ray thought these were rare events. Ray's ideas were opposed to other prevailing theories of the origin of fossils: that they were lusi naturae, "games of nature"; that they were formed by some sort of creative force or "Plastick Virtue" acting on the Earth; or that they had been made by God for His pleasure, or by God as models for living organisms, or by the Devil to tempt, frighten, or confuse people.
Ray explained fossils that resembled no living organism as due to ignorance of the full range of living organisms. Like most scientists of his time and after, Ray was reluctant to accept the idea that God would allow any beings in his perfect creation to go extinct: "If it be said that these species be lost out of the world, that is a supposition which philosophers hitherto have been unwilling to admit." Ray thought that the strange forms seen as fossils might still be living on the Earth in unexplored places. But towards the end of his life, Ray began to wonder what those mysterious fossils might mean. Some of his doubts came from his correspondence with the Welsh naturalist Edward Lhwyd, who in 1695 sent Ray some plant fossils of a type that had never been seen.
Ray's theology is strikingly different from modern biological thought. Yet his goal of a natural system of classification inspired Linnaeus, and generations of systematists after Linnaeus, to collect, document, and classify organisms; Ray's work began to bring order to the study of species. Ray's use of total morphology to classify organisms would become a powerful tool in the hands of evolutionary biologists trying to infer evolutionary relationships. Ray's insight that fossils were once living organisms was a significant advance over most other theories of his time, and his prophetic questions as to what fossils might indicate about the Earth's age and history would be taken up by generations of paleontologists. Natural theology remained an influential doctrine for well over a century after Ray's death; inspiring naturalists to look at form in the context of function, it laid the groundwork for evolutionary studies of adaptation and fitness. Many of the 19th-century natural historians who influenced Darwin, such as Agassiz, Paley, Sedgwick, and Buckland, were followers of natural theology or strongly influenced by it.
Quotations:
"I cannot but look upon the strange Instinct of this noisome and troublesome Creature a Louse, of searching out foul and nasty Clothes to harbor and breed in, as an Effect of divine Providence, design'd to deter Men and Women from Sluttishness and Sordidness."
Membership
John Ray was a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Royal Society
,
England
1667 - 1705
Personality
Ray was known as a modest and sensitive man. Despite his success and his fame, he maintained his modesty and interacted easily with rich and poor alike. John Ray never lost his love and wonder for nature and had no problem reconciling his views of the world with his views of religion.
Quotes from others about the person
"In his dealings [Ray was], no man more strictly just; in his conversation, no man more humble, courteous, and affable; towards God, no man more devout; and towards the poor and distressed, no man more compassionate and charitable." - William Derham, English clergyman, natural theologian, natural philosopher and scientist
Connections
In 1972 Ray married Margaret Oakeley, a member of the household at Middleton Hall. With their four daughters, they retired to Black Notley, where Ray spent the rest of his life engaged in prolific writing and correspondence.
