John Ray was the chief botanist of the time. He was a blacksmith’s son, born in 1628 at Black Notley, near Braintree, Essex. He was sent from Braintree School to Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship of Trinity; in 1651 was Greek Lecturer of his college, and afterwards Mathematical Reader. In 1660 he published a Latin Catalogue of Plants growing about Cambridge, and then made a botanical tour through Great Britain. His Latin “Catalogue of the Plants of England and the Adjacent Isles” first appeared in 1670. Ray took orders at the Restoration, but refused subscription, and resigned. In 1663 he spent three years with a pupil, Mr. F. Willoughby, on the Continent, and published an account of his travels in 1673, as “Observations made in a Journey through Part of the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, and France, with a Catalogue of Plants not Natives of England.” Ray married in 1673, a lady twenty-four years younger than himself; educated the children of his friend Mr. Willoughby, who had died in 1672; and finally, in 1679, he settled in his native place, and lived there till his death, in 1705. Among his chief books was “A Collection of English Proverbs, with Short Annotations,” first published in 1670; and in the reign of William III. he produced, in 1691, “The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Creation;” in 1692, “Miscellaneous Discourses concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World;” in 1693, “Three Physico-Theological Discourses concerning Chaos, the Deluge, and the Dissolution of the World;” and in 1700, “A Persuasive to a Holy Life.”

Personal

  Dear Sir,—The best of friends. These are to take a final leave of you as to this world. I look upon myself as a dying man. God requite your kindness expressed any ways towards me an hundred fold,—bless you with a confluence of all good things in this world, and eternal life and happiness hereafter,—grant us an happy meeting in heaven. I am, Sir, eternally yours.

  Mr. Ray was a man of excellent natural parts, and had a singular vivacity in his style, whether he wrote in English or Latin, which was equally easy to him; all which (notwithstanding his great age, and the debility and infirmities of his body) he retained, even to his dying day; of which he gave good proof in some of his letters, written manifestly with a dying hand. In a word, in his dealings, 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, according to his abilities.

  He found the highest wisdom to consist in the cordial reception of the revealed will of God, and in unfeigned subjection to it.

  In the likeness of Ray the phrenologist will look in vain for indications of those intellectual faculties which are displayed in his writings. The forehead is contracted in all its dimensions; so as to form a direct contrast to that of Cuvier, another naturalist of equal industry and zeal, but perhaps of not more comprehensive mind.

  Ray died rich in honours, but not rich in money, as he had to give up his living in the Church for conscience’s sake and conform as a layman. He was singularly charitable in his opinions to others; and as his work has lasted until the present day, and has influenced the progress of natural history, England may well be proud of the blacksmith’s son.

General

  Of this inestimable writer, whose works do honour to our nation, as a late disciple of the great Swedish naturalist justly observes, I cannot help saying further, that no writer till his time ever advanced all the branches of natural history so much as that sagacious, diligent, English observer, whose systematical spirit threw a light on everything he undertook, and contributed not a little to those great and wonderful improvements which have since been introduced.

  Our countryman, the excellent Mr. Ray, is the only describer that conveys some precise idea in every term or word, maintaining his superiority over his followers and imitators, in spite of the advantage of fresh discoveries, and modern information.

  Mr. Ray had the singular happiness of devoting fifty years of his life to the cultivation of the sciences he loved. Incited by the most ardent genius, which overcame innumerable difficulties and discouragements, his labours were, in the end, crowned with success before almost unequalled. He totally reformed the studies of botany and zoology; he raised them to the dignity of a science, and placed them in an advantageous point of view; and, by his own investigations, added more real improvement to them in England than any of his predecessors…. The extent of his improvements in science procured him the admiration of his contemporaries, and have justly transmitted his name to posterity, among those who have done honour to their age and country.

  The distinctive character of Ray’s works consists in the clearness of his methods, which were not only more rigorous than those of any of his predecessors, but applied with great uniformity and precision. The divisions which he introduced into the classes of quadrupeds and birds have been followed by English naturalists even to the present day; and we find evident traces of Ray’s arrangement of birds in Linnæus, Brisson, Buffon, and all authors who have written upon this class of animals…. These labours, however, in nearly all branches of natural history, vast as they appear to the imagination, did not distract Ray from his earlier theological studies. In his treatise entitled “The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation,” he has well shown how these studies could be combined…. All his works on natural history are in Latin; they are composed in an unaffected style, and are less cumbered than those of his successors with a multitude of new terms, so burdensome to the memory.

  His merits have been duly appreciated, both by foreigners and his own countrymen; and although, in the last century, they seemed in danger of falling into oblivion, amid the blaze of the numerous discoveries and improvements then made, they are, at the present day, brought more prominently into view, when men have begun to compare systems, and to shake off the influence of party-spirit. An interesting commemoration of him was made in London on the 29th November 1828. A genus of plants was dedicated to his memory by Plumier, under the name of Jan Raia, which Linnæus changed into Rajania, and Smith into Raiana.

  Among the original works of Ray, we may select the “Synopsis Methodica Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpentini Generis,” published in 1693. This book makes an epoch in zooölogy, not for the additions of new species it contains, since there are few wholly such, but as the first classification of animals that can be reckoned both general and grounded in nature. He divides them into those with blood and without blood. The former are such as breathe through lungs, and such as breathe through gills. Of the former of these, some have a heart with two ventricles; some have one only. And, among the former class of these, some are viviparous, some oviparous. We thus come to the proper distinction of mammalia. But, in compliance with vulgar prejudice, Ray did not include the cetacea in the same class with quadrupeds, though well aware that they properly belonged to it; and left them as an order of fishes. Quadrupeds he was the first to divide into ungulate and unguiculate, hoofed and clawed; having himself invented the Latin words…. Ray was the first zoölogist who made use of comparative anatomy.

  The extent of the influence of the genius of Ray on the science of natural history is far greater than can be estimated by the number or size of the volumes which he wrote, and is to be traced to his habit of acute observation of facts and the logical accuracy with which he arranged them. He made his knowledge of the structure and physiology of plants subservient to a great plan for their arrangement, and this plan, when carefully examined, will be found to contain the fundamental principles of all the more recent scientific systems in natural history, and to have laid the foundation of the views of a natural classification of the vegetable kingdom put forward in later times.

  Ray, who first supplied materials for the argument for natural religion, drawn from final causes.

  Though he was not quite clear as regards the distinction, which we now express by the words dicotyledonous and monocotyledonous embryo, yet he may claim the great merit of having founded the natural system in part upon this difference in the formation of the embryo. He displays more conspicuously than any systematist before Jussieu the power of perceiving the larger groups of relationship in the vegetable kingdom, and of defining them by certain marks; these marks, moreover, he determines not on a priori grounds, but from acknowledged affinities; but it is only in the great divisions of his system that he is thus true to the right course; in the details he commits many and grievous offences against his own method.

  Wrote chiefly in Latin, but composed his treatise on “The Wisdom of God in the Creation” in his mother-tongue. The anthropomorphism of this earnest, lucid, and ingenious book, the prototype of Paley’s, is a defect hardly to be avoided in an age when the Deity was almost universally conceived as an artificer; and yet Ray comes very near indeed to the conception of a power imminent in Nature. His style is limpid and persuasive; his reasoning cogent; his good sense is apparent in his discussion of spontaneous generation and the stories related in its support, although the caution and modesty of his temper sometimes incline him to defer too much to authority. He has no mercy, for example, on frogs rained from the sky, but will not, in the face of the testimony of eye-witnesses, carry scepticism to the point of disputing that they may have been occasionally found immured in the middle of stones.

  Though the purity of Ray’s Latin has formed the topic of many encomia, Ray’s English style is perhaps hardly sufficiently distinguished to secure for him any great position in general literature. His merits as a writer on other topics than natural science are those of the man of science who amasses materials with painstaking care and critical capacity. John Locke, speaking of his “Travels” (1673), mentions Ray’s brief yet ingenious descriptions of everything that he saw, and his enlargement upon everything that was curious and rare; but it is only at the present day, since the rise of the scientific study of dialect and folklore, that the value of some of his collections, such as those of proverbs and rare words, is fully realised. Contrary to what has been sometimes said of him, Ray was never a mere compiler. He well knew how to adopt and combine the results of others with his own investigations, but he never blindly copied the statements of others, while he always acknowledged his obligations.