John Ray

John Ray (1627, Black Notley – 1705) was a botanist and a pioneer of classification systems. In 1644 he studied at St Catherine’s Hall in Cambridge and moved to Trinity College in 1646. In 1649 he was elected to a fellowship at Trinity college. Ray was Puritan in spirit and refused to take an oath prescribed by the Act of Uniformity. After 13 years he lost his fellowship but supported by prosperous friends he pursued his career as a naturalist. In 1660 he published his first work, a catalog of plants growing around Cambridge. An expedition in 1662 to Wales and Cornwall with the naturalist Francis Willughby was a turning point in his life. Willughby and Ray agreed to undertake a study of the complete natural history of living things, with Ray responsible for the plant kingdom and Willughby the animal. In 1670 Ray produced a Catalogus Plantarum Angliae (“Catalog of English Plants”). After Willughby’s death in 1672 Ray took up the completion of Willughby’s portion of their project. In 1676 he published Ornithologia under Willughby’s name, even though Ray had contributed at least as much as Willughby. Ray also completed F. Willughbeii, De historia piscium (1685; history of fish) under Willughby’s name, even though Ray had contributed at least as much as Willughby. In 1682 he had published a Methodus plantarum nova, revised in 1703 as the Methodus plantarum emendata. On the basis of the Methodus, he constructed his masterwork, the Historia plantarum, three huge volumes that appeared between 1686 and 1704. In the 1690s Ray also published three volumes on religion. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691) was his most popular and influential book.