| Scientist: John Ray |
[b. Black Notley, England, November 29, 1627, d. Black Notley, January 17, 1705]
A prolific cataloger and writer, Ray introduced the first significant system of classifying plants and animals based on anatomy and physiology (it was superseded by the scheme of Linnaeus in 1735). Ray separated flowering plants into two groups, monocots and dicots, and was the first to use species as the fundamental unit of classification.
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| Biography: John Ray |
The English naturalist John Ray (1627-1705) was an early botanical and zoological systematist who divided plants into monocotyledons and dicotyledons.
John Ray was born on Nov. 29, 1627, at Black Notley, Essex, where his father was the village blacksmith. At the age of 16 he entered Catharine Hall at Cambridge. In 1646 he transferred to Trinity College, where he graduated and was elected a fellow in 1649.
Early Exploration and Writing
In 1650 Ray fell ill, and, as he himself recounted, this led to a deepening of his interest in botany: "I had been ill, physically and mentally, and had to rest from more serious study and so could ride or walk. There was leisure to contemplate by the way what lay constantly before the eyes and were so often trodden thoughtlessly underfoot, the various beauty of plants, the cunning craftsmanship of nature." For 6 years Ray studied the literature, explored the countryside around Cambridge, and grew plants in the garden by his room in college. Only then was he able to start on his book, which was finished in 1659 and called Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium (Cambridge Catalogue). This small, unpretentious pocketbook contained a great store of information and learning and was destined to initiate a new era in British botany.
During the writing of the Cambridge Catalogue, Ray had the encouragement of several friends at Cambridge, one of whom was Francis Willughby. In 1659, before the Cambridge Catalogue had been published, he had written to Willughby proposing a much more ambitious project: a complete British flora. However, life at Cambridge was becoming difficult for Ray because of religious controversies. In 1660 he was ordained as a priest, according to the requirements of the college statutes, but in 1662 he refused to accept the Act of Uniformity, resigned his offices in the college, and returned to his native village. Because of his integrity he was now unemployed, cut off forever from the resources of the university, and yet he was free; all he asked was that his friends should not desert him.
Earlier in 1662 Ray had visited Wales with Willughby, and the journey deepened their friendship. Both shared the conviction that, for the naturalist, museum studies and the literature must be subordinate to firsthand knowledge of the organism in its wild environment and that classification must take into account the way of life, the function as well as the structure.
For 3 years (1663-1666) Ray, Willughby, and two other friends traveled throughout Europe, studying and recording the flora and fauna. Ray's journeys gave him the data for his lifework and also introduced him to the centers of learning in Europe. The fruit of these researches was harvested at intervals during the next 30 years in the series of volumes which helped to lay the foundations of botany and zoology. His tours in Britain had a more immediate sequel, for in 1670 he published the Catalogus plantarum Angliae et insularum adjacentium, which was a flora of the British Isles, modeled on his earlier Cambridge Catalogue. It contained a long section on the medicinal use of plants, which denounces astrology, alchemy, and witchcraft and is ruthless in its demands for evidence. In 1671 Ray was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
Willughby died in 1672, and 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.
Biotic Classification Schemes
In 1673 Ray married a girl of 20 who was to bear him four daughters. The following year 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 (1682), raises his observations on seed leaves (soon to be called cotyledons) to a principle of great importance. He states that "from the difference in seeds can be derived a general distinction of plants, a distinction in my judgment the first and by far the best of all - that is into those which have a seed plant with two leaves, and those whose seed plant is analogous to the adult." This is the division into dicotyledons and monocotyledons which all subsequent botanists have adopted.
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 Jan. 17, 1705.
Ray's greatness as a scientist lies in his refusal to concentrate upon the study of one part of an organism to the exclusion of the whole and in his refusal to supplement his observations by speculation. He not only saw the need for precise and ordered knowledge but was able to provide, by his personal observations, classifications which form the basis of much of modern botany and zoology.
Further Reading
A biography of Ray is Charles E. Raven, John Ray, Naturalist: His Life and Works (1942). Ray is discussed in Charles Singer, A History of Biology (1931; 3d ed. 1959). See also Geoffrey Keynes, John Ray: A Bibliography (1951).
Additional Sources
Keynes, Geoffrey, Sir, John Ray, 1627-1705: a bibliography, 1660-1970: a descriptive bibliography of the works of John Ray, English naturalist, philologist, and theologian, with introductions, annotations, various indexes, and a supplement of new entries, additions and corrections by the author, Amsterdam: G. Th. van Heusden, 1976.
Raven, Charles E. (Charles Earle), John Ray, naturalist: his life and works, Cambridge Cambridgeshire; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: John Ray |
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| British History: John Ray |
Ray, John (1607-1705). Naturalist. The son of an Essex blacksmith, Ray was enabled to study at Cambridge, where he subsequently taught for thirteen years. Supported by prosperous friends, he pursued his career as a naturalist, attempting a systematic description of all living things. Botany remained his first love and he laid the foundation for a system of classification based on all structural characteristics, setting out many of the natural orders now employed by botanists.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: John Ray |
Bibliography
See his Correspondence, ed. by E. Lankester (1848) and Further Correspondence, ed. by R. W. Gunther (1928); C. E. Raven, John Ray, Naturalist (2d ed. 1951).
| History 1450-1789: John Ray |
Ray, John (or Wray, 1627–1705), British natural historian and natural philosopher. The son of a blacksmith, John Ray was born in Black Notley, Essex. He received his early education at the Braintree grammar school and was admitted to Catherine Hall at Cambridge University in 1644. In 1646 Ray transferred to Trinity College, from which he graduated with bachelor's (1648) and master's (1651) degrees; he was elected a fellow of the college (1649–1662). Ray, who was ordained as a clergyman in the Church of England (1660), resigned his fellowship in 1662 rather than take the oaths required by the Act of Uniformity. In 1667, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and continued his beloved studies of natural history through the generosity of his friend and patron, Francis Willughby (1635–1672).
Sometimes called the "father of natural history," 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 authored or edited numerous books that cover the full spectrum of natural history. However, it is as a botanist that he is best remembered; his three-volume Historia Plantarum (1686–1704) and his Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britannicarum (1690) remained standard botanical texts in Britain for much of the eighteenth century. In his plant taxonomy, Ray sought to define obviously natural groups of species and to classify them according to their maximum natural affinities. Accordingly, members of any two groups of plants showing a high degree of similarity in an array of physical characteristics would be assumed to be related and would be grouped together. His first formal statement of plant classification, the Methodus Plantarum Nova (1682), assigned taxonomic standing to the number of seed leaves produced by the embryo, providing the foundation to distinguish the major classes of flowering plants into monocotyledons and dicotyledons. This innovation was adopted by Antoine Laurent de Jussieu in the Genera Plantarum (1789), which gradually replaced the artificial classification system of Linnaeus.
Ray's popular and frequently reprinted Wisdom of God Manifest in the Works of Creation (1691) and his Miscellaneous Discourses concerning the Dissolution of the World (1692) are paradigmatic examples of British natural theology. Founding these on evidence drawn from his experience of natural history, Ray sought to provide rational arguments for the existence of God and to demonstrate God's providential activity in the world. Ray's natural theological works also served to publicize contemporary views on such controversial topics as spontaneous generation and the organic nature of fossils, which had theological implications as well as scientific importance in the early modern period. Ray's natural theology ultimately made the study of natural history an acceptable and pious practice for Anglican gentlemen and for Anglican divines.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Ray, John. Historia Plantarum. London, Vol. I, 1686; Vol. II, 1688; Vol. III, 1704.
——. Methodus Plantarum Emendata et Aucta. London, 1703.
——. Methodus Plantarum Nova Brevitatis et Perspicuitatis causa Synoptice in Tabulis Exhibita. London, 1682.
——. Miscellaneous Discourses Concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World. [Later editions entitled Three Physico-Theological Discourses.] London, 1692.
——. Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britannicarum. London, 1690; 2nd ed., 1696; 3rd. ed. 1724.
——. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation. London, 1691.
Willughby, Francis. Francisci Willugbeii Armig. de Historia Piscium. 2 vols. Oxford, 1686.
——. The Ornithology of Francis Willughby of Middleton. London, 1678.
Secondary Sources
Cain, A. J. "John Ray on 'Accidents."' Archives of Natural History 23 (1996): 343–368.
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.
Keynes, Sir Geoffrey. John Ray, 1672–1705: A Bibliography, 1660–1970: A Descriptive Bibliography of the Works of John Ray, English Naturalist, Philologist and Theologian, with Introductions, Annotations, Various Indexes. Amsterdam, 1976.
Mc Mahon, Susan. "John Ray (1627–1705) and the Act of Uniformity 1662." Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 54 (2000): 153–178.
Raven, Charles R. John Ray: Naturalist. His Life and His Works. 2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K., 1950; reprinted 1986.
—SUSAN MCMAHON
| Quotes By: John Ray |
Quotes:
"Diseases are the tax on pleasures."
"Many without punishment, none without sin."
"There are no better cosmetics than a severe temperance and purity, modesty and humility, a gracious temper and calmness of spirit; and there is no true beauty without the signatures of these graces in the very countenance."
"Never meet trouble half-way."
"Industry is fortunes right hand, and frugality its left."
"Children are poor men's riches."
See more famous quotes by
John Ray
| Wikipedia: John Ray |
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| John Ray | |
 John Ray
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| Born | November 29, 1627 Black Notley, near Braintree |
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| Died | January 17, 1705 |
| Nationality | English |
| Fields | naturalist |
John Ray (November 29, 1627 – January 17, 1705) was an English naturalist, sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used 'Ray', 'having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him.' [1]
He published important works on plants, animals, and natural theology. His classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum, was an important step towards modern taxonomy. Ray rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a pre-conceived, either/or type system, and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation. Thus he advanced scientific empiricism against the deductive rationalism of the scholastics. He coined the term species.[2]
Contents |
John Ray was born in the village of Black Notley, near Braintree, in the county of Essex, in the south east of England. He is said to have been born in the smithy, his father having been the village blacksmith. From Braintree school he was sent at the age of sixteen to Cambridge University: at first admitted to Trinity College, he migrated to Catharine Hall after a month, and returned to Trinity College after about one year and three-quarters.[3] His tutor at Trinity was James Duport, Regius Professor of Greek, and his intimate friend and fellow-pupil the celebrated Isaac Barrow. Ray was chosen minor fellow of Trinity in 1649, and in due course became a major fellow on proceeding to the master's degree. He held many college offices, becoming successively lecturer in Greek (1651), mathematics (1653),and humanity (1655), praelector (1657), junior dean (1657), and college steward (1659 and 1660); and according to the habit of the time, he was accustomed to preach in his college chapel and also at Great St Mary's before the university, long before he took holy orders. Among his sermons preached before his ordination, which was not till the 23 December 1660, were the famous discourses on The Wisdom of God in the Creation, and on Deluge and Dissolution of the World. Ray's reputation was high also as a tutor; and he communicated his own passion for natural history to several pupils, of whom Francis Willughby is by far the most famous.
Ray's quiet college life closed when he found himself unable to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity 1661, and was obliged to give up his fellowship in 1662, the year after Isaac Newton had entered the college. We are told by Dr Derham in his Life of Ray that the reason of his refusal:
[...] his having taken the 'Solemn League and Covenant', for that he never did, and often declared that he ever thought it an unlawful oath; but he said he could not declare for those that had taken the oath that no obligation lay upon them, but feared there might.
From this time onwards he seems to have depended chiefly on the bounty of his pupil Willughby, who made Ray his constant companion while he lived, and at his death left him 6 shillings a year, with the charge of educating his two sons.
In the spring of 1663 Ray started together with Willughby and two other pupils on a tour through Europe, from which he returned in March 1666, parting from Willughby at Montpellier, whence the latter continued his journey into Spain. He had previously in three different journeys (1658, 1661, 1662) travelled through the greater part of Great Britain, and selections from his private notes of these journeys were edited by George Scott in 1760, under the title of Mr Ray's Itineraries. Ray himself published an account of his foreign travel in 1673, entitled Observations topographical, moral, and physiological, made on a Journey through part of the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, and France. From this tour Ray and Willughby returned laden with collections, on which they meant to base complete systematic descriptions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Willughby undertook the former part, but, dying in 1672, left only an ornithology and ichthyology, in themselves vast, for Ray to edit; while the latter used the botanical collections for the groundwork of his Methodus planiarurn nova (1682), and his great Historia generalis plantarum (3 vols., 1686, 1688, 1704). The plants gathered on his British tours had already been described in his Catalogus plantarum Angliae (1670), which work is the basis of all later English floras.
In 1667 Ray was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1669 he published in conjunction with Willughby his first paper in the Philosophical Transactions on Experiments concerning the Motion of Sap in Trees. They demonstrated the ascent of the sap through the wood of the tree, and supposed the sap to precipitate a kind of white coagulum or jelly, which may be well conceived to be the part which every year between bark and tree turns to wood and of which the leaves and fruits are made. Immediately after his admission into the Royal Society he was induced by Bishop John Wilkins to translate his Real Character into Latin, and it seems he actually completed a translation, which, however, remained in manuscript; his Methodus plantarum nova was in fact undertaken as a part of Wilkins's great classificatory scheme.
In 1673 Ray married Margaret Oakley of Launton; in 1676 he went to Sutton Coldfield, and in 1677 to Falborne Hall in Essex. Finally, in 1679, he removed to Black Notley, where he afterwards remained. His life there was quiet and uneventful, although he had poor health, including chronic sores. He occupied himself in writing books and in keeping up a wide scientific correspondence, and lived, in spite of his infirmities, to the age of seventy-six, dying at Black Notley. The Ray Society, for the publication of works on natural history, was founded in his honor in 1844.
Ray's first book, the Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium (1660, followed by appendices in 1663 and 1685), was written in conjunction with his amicissimus et individuus comes, John Nid. The 626 plants are listed alphabetically, but a system of classification differing little from Caspar Bauhin's is sketched at the end of the book; and the notes contain many references to other parts of natural history. The locations of the plants are minutely described; and Cambridge students still gather some of their rarer plants in the copses or chalk-pits where he found them. The book shows signs of his indebtedness to Joachim Jung of Hamburg, who had died in 1657, leaving his writings unpublished; but a manuscript copy of some of them was sent to Ray by Samuel Hartlib in 1660. Jung invented or gave precision to many technical terms which Ray and others at once made use of in their descriptions, and which are now classical; and his notions of what constitutes a specific distinction and what characters are valueless as such seem to have been adopted with little change by Ray. The first two editions of the Catalogus plantarum Angliae (1670, 1677) were likewise it must be remembered that the difference between the monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous embryo was detected by Nehemiah Grew. A serious fault was his persistent separation of trees from herbs, a distinction whose falsity had been exposed by Jung and others, but to which Ray tried to give scientific foundation by denying the existence of buds in the latter. At this time he based his classification, like Caesalpinus, chiefly upon the fruit, and he distinguished several natural groups, such as the grasses, Labiatae, Umbelliferae and Papilionaceae.
The classification of the Methodus was extended and improved in the Historia plantarum, but was disfigured by a large class of Anomalae, to include forms that the other orders did not easily admit, and by the separation of the cereals from other grasses. This vast book enumerates and describes all the plants known to the author or described by his predecessors, to the number, according to Adanson, of 18,625 species. In the first volume a chapter De plantis in genere contains an account of all the anatomical and physiological knowledge of the time regarding plants, with the recent speculations and discoveries of Caesalpinus, Grew, Malpighi and Jung; and Cuvier and Dupetit Thouars, declaring that it was this chapter which gave acceptance and authority to these authors works, say that the best monument that could be erected to the memory of Ray would be the republication of this part of his work separately. The Stirpium Europaearum extra Britannias nascentium Sylloge (1694) is a much amplified edition of the catalogue of plants collected on his own European tour. In the preface to this book he first clearly admitted the doctrine of the sexuality of plants, which, however, he had no share in establishing. Here also begins his long controversy with August Bachmann (Augustus Quirinus Rivinus) which chiefly turned upon Ray's indefensible separation of ligneous, from herbaceous plants, and also upon what he conceived to be the misleading reliance that Rivinus placed on the characters of the corolla. But in the second edition of his Methodus (1704) he followed Rivinus and Joseph Pitton de Tournefort in taking the flower instead of the fruit as his basis of classification: he was no longer a fructicist but a corollist. He also proved that a tree (living) conducts water.
Besides editing his friend Francis Willughby's books, Ray wrote several zoological works of his own, including Synopsis methodica Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpentini Generis (1693), that is to say, both mammals and reptiles, and Synopsis methodica Avium et Piscium (1713); the latter was published posthumously, as was also the more important Historia Insectorum, which embodied a great mass of Willughbys notes.
Most of Ray's minor works were the outcome of his faculty for carefully amassing facts; for instance, his Collection of English Proverbs (1670), his Collection of Out-of-the-way English Words (1674), his Collection of Curious Travels and Voyages (1693), and his Dictionariolum trilingue (1675, 5th edition as Nomenclator classicus, 1706). The last was written for the use of Willughby's sons, his pupils; it passed through many editions, and is still useful for its careful identifications of plants and animals mentioned by Greek and Latin writers. But Ray's influence and reputation have depended largely upon his two books entitled The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), and Miscellaneous Discourses concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World (1692). The latter includes three essays on The Primitive Chaos and Creation of the World, The General Deluge, its Causes and Effects, and The Dissolution of the World and Future Conflagrations. The germ of these works was contained in sermons preached long before in Cambridge. Both books obtained immediate popularity, and the former, at least, was translated into several languages. In The Wisdom of God Ray recites innumerable examples of the perfection of organic mechanism, the multitude and variety of living creatures, the minuteness and usefulness of their parts, and many, if not most, of the familiar examples of purposive adaptation and design in nature were suggested by him, such as the structure of the eye, the hollowness of the bones, the camel's stomach and the hedgehog's armour.
Ray's works were directly influential on the development of taxonomy by Linneaus. In 1844, the Ray Society was founded, named after John Ray, and has since published over 160 books on natural history.
In 1986, to mark the 300th anniversary of the publication of Ray's Historia Plantarum, there was a celebration of Ray's legacy in Braintree. A "John Ray Gallery" was opened in the Braintree Museum. The scientific society at his old college, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, is named the "John Ray Society" after him.[4]
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