John Ray

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.

Works

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 plants, 626 in number, are enumerated 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 curious references to other parts of natural history. The stations 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 The book shows signs of his indebtedness to Joachim Jung of Hamburg, who had died in 1657, leaving his writings unpublished; but a MS. 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 arranged alphabetically; but in the Synopsis stirpium rum (1690, 1696, also re-edited by Dillenius, 1724, and by Hill, 1760) Ray applied the scheme of classification which he had by that time elaborated in the Methodus and the Historia plantarum. The Methodus plantarum nova (1682) was largely based on the works of Caesalpinus and Jung, and still more on that of Robert Morison of Oxford. The greatest merit of this book is the use of the number of cotyledons as a basis of classification; though it must be remembered that the difference between the monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous embryo was detected by Nehemiah Grew. After dividing plants into flowerless and flowering, Ray says,

Related Topics:
John Nid - Caspar Bauhin - Joachim Jung - Hamburg - Samuel Hartlib - Caesalpinus - Robert Morison - Cotyledons - Nehemiah Grew

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Floriferas dividemus in Dicotyledones. auarum semina sata binis foliis anomalis, seminalibus dictis, quae cotyledonorum usum praestant, e terra exeunt, yel in binos saltem lobos dividuntur, quamvis eos supra terrem foliorum specie non efferunt; et Monocotyledones, quae nec folia bina seminalia efferunt nec lobos binos condunt. Haec divisio ad arbores etiam extendi potest; siquidem Palmae et congeneres hoc respectu eodem modo a reliquis arboribus differunt quo Monocotyledones a reliquis herbis.

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But a serious blemish 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.

Related Topics:
Labiatae - Umbelliferae - Papilionaceae

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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 Rivinus (Augustus Quirinus Bachmann) 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 (1703) 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.

Related Topics:
Augustus Quirinus Bachmann - Joseph Pitton de Tournefort

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Besides editing his friend 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 Aviusn et Piscium (1713); the latter was published posthumously, as was also the more important Historia Insectorum, which embodied a great mass of Willughbys notes.

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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 edtions, 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.

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