Ray's work as a botanist and zoologist was mainly concerned with description and classification; and as such lay outside the area of speculative and controversial science. He found the study of nature in a primitive and inchoate state, and was content to devote himself to the primary business of observing, discriminating, defining and arranging the flora and fauna to which he could get access. The need for such work and the magnitude of his contribution to it are obvious: there could be no scientific biology until it had been undertaken. In perceiving and insisting that specific distinctions must be based not upon size or colour, habitat or habits, but upon structure, Ray vindicated his claim to be something more than a maker of collections and catalogues, and repudiated in advance Linnaeus's criticism of him. If his researches into plant and animal anatomy seldom led him beyond the study of taxonomy into the problems of form and function, still less into those of evolution or genetics, he very effectively laid the foundation for such studies and, as we have seen, pointed the way towards them.

The publication of the Methodus marks the close of the first half of Ray's career as a scientist. By it he had fulfilled a threefold obligation laid upon him by the embarrassing request of Bishop Wilkins, by the failure of the Tables, and by the requests of his friends; and so had completed the first phase of his botanical studies. Hitherto his life had been unsettled: he had turned his enforced homelessness to good account, collected a mass of material, discharged his debt to Willughby, and done good service to British botany. But opportunities for large-scale work in his own field had been scanty. He was not master of his time or circumstances, and could not settle down to uninterrupted study or plan a long piece of research. Only when he had finally moved to Dewlands and renounced all prospect of further travel or of promotion could he begin the larger tasks for which his experience fitted him. Lists of synonyms and localities and a scheme of classification were, as he now realised, the proper prelude to a larger undertaking, a History of Plants which should not merely catalogue but describe, which should not be confined to Britain or Western Europe but include all known species, which should not be alphabetical or arbitrary in its arrangement but should illustrate, expand and modify his Method.

SOURCES

The need for a fresh study of the life of Ray has long been recognised. Not only are the existing biographical notices (they cannot be called ‘lives’) admittedly defective, but thanks largely to the energy of G. S. Boulger and R. W. T. Gunther we have now available all the material that is likely to be recovered. It may be that the manuscript of his ‘Catalogue of plants grown in the Cambridge gardens’, which he seems to have written in or before 1662 and used in his Historia Plantarum, may yet be found: it will not add much to our knowledge of him or its subject. There may possibly be a few additional letters, perhaps even the letters to Robinson which Derham used and epitomised, but it is unlikely; and under present conditions search for them is impossible.

Apart from his own books the main sources are as follows:

1. The Life by ‘a worthy friend’, certainly Samuel Dale of Braintree, printed in A Compleat History of Europe for the year 1706 under the heading ‘Additions to the Remarkables of the year 1705’: in 1705 the editor announcing Ray's death had complained that he had failed to obtain a worthy notice of him. This is the Life printed by R. W. T. Gunther, Further Correspondence of John Ray, London, 1928, from a MS. in the Bodleian: Dr Gunther was apparently not aware that it had been printed before.

2. […]

The death of Francis Willughby, on 3 July 1672, in his thirty-seventh year, was a blow to Ray more severe even than the loss of his fellowship at Cambridge. On the earlier occasion he had foreseen his fate and chosen it under the constraint of conscience but with open eyes. It had led to the formation of a plan and a partnership, the worth of which was tested and approved in the next decade. Now almost without warning the partnership was broken and the plan imperilled. Ray's feelings are revealed in the prayer that he offered in the family after its bereavement and in the noble Preface to the Ornithology: they are not less plainly shown in his refusal to abandon their joint purpose, in his acceptance of its fulfilment as a debt of honour to his dead friend, in the energy with which he took up the immediate task of caring for the children and perpetuating the work entrusted to his charge.

The loss of Willughby was inevitably irreparable. His portraits, the picture probably by Gerard Soest, engraved rather badly by Lizars, and the bust by Roubiliac in Trinity College, bear out the testimony of his partner.

There is little more that need be said. Derham printed the confession which the Rev. William Pyke, who had succeeded Plume as Rector of Black Notley in 1686, reported as made by Ray on his death-bed. It is a plain statement of faith and of loyalty to the Church of England such as his whole life corroborates. Sloane, who sent an offer of sympathy and help to Margaret Ray, preserved a few letters from her in which she consulted him about approaching Sir Thomas Willughby for the payment of the half year's annuity, told him that the books were to be sold and were being catalogued by Dale, that the insects and all the papers about them had been delivered to Dale for his (Sloane's) use, and that Willughby's papers were safe and would be returned when instruction was given. Later, when Sir Thomas had responded ‘in charity’ to Sloane's petition, she wrote again to express gratitude, to return the papers and to report that ‘the circumstances of the family cannot but be strait when Mr Ray did not leave £40 per year among us all out of which taxes, repairs and quit-rents make a great hole’. By his will dated 13 April 1704 and proved in the Commissary Court of the Bishop of London for Essex, Ray had left £4 to the poor of the parish and £5 to the Library of Trinity College; Dewlands to his wife and afterwards to his daughters; and to them lands in Hockley, ‘Bird's lands’ at Black Notley and £200 respectively.

The twelve years which Ray spent at Trinity after securing his fellowship were a period of profound importance for the intellectual life of Britain. Macaulay, summarising the condition of England in 1685, declared that ‘the English genius was effecting in science a revolution which will to the end of time be reckoned among the highest achievements of the human intellect…the civil troubles had stimulated the faculties of the educated classes and had called forth a restless activity and an insatiable curiosity…the torrent which had been dammed up in one channel rushed violently into another’. The suggestion that England was a pioneer in this field is not of course correct: in Italy, France, Germany and the Low Countries scientific studies had been attracting attention for at least a century. But Green's record—‘From the vexed problems, religious and political, with which it had so long wrestled in vain, England turned at last to the physical world around it…and its method of research by observation, comparison and experiment, transformed the older methods of enquiry in matters without its pale’—emphasises more judiciously the same characteristic of the period.

Of the condition of science at the time when Ray first devoted himself to it there is abundant evidence in his own writings. The literature in each department of zoology will best be considered when we treat of his contribution to it. But though he had certainly read the works of Gesner and his English friends Caius and Mouffet before he published his first book and had a good knowledge of Aristotle, Pliny, Dioscorides and the other ancients, it was then only in botany that he was a master.

Here so far as Britain is concerned the foundation had been laid by Ray's Cambridge predecessor, William Turner, a student at Pembroke Hall, elected to a fellowship in 1531 and compiling his first essay, Libellus de re herbaria novus, in 1538. Turner gives a clear account of the total ignorance of botany in the University at that time: ‘I could never learn one Greek neither Latin nor English name, even amongst the physicians, of any herb or tree…and as yet there was no English Herbal but one full of unlearned cacographies and falsely naming of herbs.’ Enthusiasm for the Reformation drove Turner from Cambridge into exile: he travelled widely, met Gesner and studied botany at Bologna under Luca Ghini, the first professor of the subject, and published a second tract in 1548.

When Ray came into residence Cambridge, or at least the centre of the town, was externally not unlike its modern self. The river had been brought into its present course; the island opposite Trinity had been removed; the sites of the chief bridges had been fixed; the main streets had taken their present form. The Colleges, save for the four foundations of the nineteenth century, were all established. The great period of building which created the library of St John's, the first court of Clare and the fellows' building of Christ's, had just closed. Apart from the third court of St John's and the work of Wren, the chapels of Pembroke and Emmanuel and the library of Trinity, the town was the same as it is in Loggan's map, published in 1688, and almost as it remained for more than a century. There was no Senate-house: Ray's friend, Isaac Barrow, failed to persuade the University to emulate Fell's Sheldonian at Oxford; and until 1722 dwellings, the Devil's Tavern and the Regent's Walk occupied its present site and most of the west side of Trumpington Street. Exercises were kept and degrees conferred in the University Church, where even in Puritan days the broad witticisms of Praevaricator or Tripos were not often taken amiss.

One last department of the great undertaking to which Ray had dedicated himself on leaving Cambridge and to which his friend Dr Tancred Robinson was constantly exhorting him still remained unfulfilled. He had published the Synopsis of British Plants in 1690 and the supplementary Sylloge of European Plants in 1694. The Synopsis of Animals and Reptiles had appeared in 1693 and that of Birds and Fishes had been sent to Dr Robinson on 29 February 1694. There remained the Insects—a tribe including, in those days, everything from an amoeba to an earthworm; and to these he turned with an energy amazing but characteristic.

It is indeed an almost heroic achievement. He was living in considerable poverty at Black Notley, remote from any libraries or collections and from contact with friends and fellow-workers. He was maintaining his other interests—in theology, in botany, and the general field of natural studies. He was constantly pressed to fresh labours by the importunity of his friends, and in 1693 edited his Collection of Curious Travels and Voyages at the request of Charles Hatton and Hans Sloane.

In considering Ray's work on geology it has been necessary to give an account of the Discourses; for, as we have seen, these are his fullest treatment of the subject and the only contribution that has received any attention from later writers. But in fact the Discourses both in their intention and in their gradual enlargement follow closely the book which he published in the previous year, 1691.

The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation is certainly his most popular and influential achievement. Published as a slim octavo volume of 249 pages, in a first edition of 500 copies, it was reprinted in a second edition of 382 pages in 1692, in a third of 414 pages in 1701 and in a fourth of 464 pages in 1704. It was reissued many times during the next century; it formed the basis of Derham's Boyle Lectures in 1711–12; it supplied the background for the thought of Gilbert White and indeed for the naturalists of three generations; it was imitated, and extensively plagiarised, by Paley in his famous Natural Theology; and more than any other single book it initiated the true adventure of modern science, and is the ancestor of the Origin of Species or of L'Évolution Créatrice.

If botany was the field of Ray's greatest and lifelong interest, it is by no means his only or even perhaps his chief claim to the gratitude of posterity. In it, as we have seen, he accomplished work which would of itself make a fine record: to it, as he constantly claims, he returned from other excursions as to his proper task. But the astonishing feature of his career is not his mastery of a single subject, but the range of his knowledge and the value of his parerga. In these days of specialisation it is difficult to believe that a man could make himself expert in the whole of zoology literally as a sideshow and in the intervals of his main study; and Ray himself never claimed to have done so. But the fact remains that after Willughby's death he set himself to produce books on birds, fishes, mammals and reptiles, and insects; and that these books, even more than his botanical writings, laid the foundation for serious scientific progress in each subject.

It has been customary to regard this aspect of his work as little more than the editing of his friend's material and to give Willughby the credit for the result.

The Historia Plantarum, for all its massive learning, did not achieve the success that it deserved. Ray himself, writing in 1689 to Lhwyd, said ‘as for cuts for my History of Plants there are none to be expected; the book sells not so well as to encourage the undertakers to be at any further charge about it. The times indeed of late have not been very propitious to the booksellers’ trade'; and Sir James Smith, writing more than a century later, declared that though ‘so ample a transcript of the practical knowledge of such a botanist cannot but be a treasure, yet it is now much neglected, few persons being learned enough to use it with facility for want of figures and a popular nomenclature’. It was in fact handicapped, as Ray had foreseen, by the lack of plates; and its bulk made it necessarily a book for the few. It is a monument to its author's greatness, and prepared the way for Linnaeus. But it could hardly do more.

For indeed it was singularly unfortunate in the time of its appearance. Ray lived and worked unmoved by the upheavals of the period: but the men to whom such a book could appeal belonged to the great world; and in Britain that world was in confusion.

Before the Cambridgeshire Catalogue was out of the press Ray had formed plans for further work. The earliest of his letters to Willughby, dated from Trinity College on 25 February 1659, accompanies a gift of the newly published work and continues with proposals:

Ray's work on the British Flora was only one comparatively small part of the output of the years after the publication of the Historia Plantarum. Busy as his life had been, no period of it was so productive as the years between 1688 and 1698; and hardly any writers can ever have produced so many and such varied books in a single decade.

Most of these publications deal with subjects other than botany. For as soon as his magnum opus was finished, he took up the task which Willughby had suggested and Robinson in his letter of 18 April 1684 had revived. The volumes in which he surveyed the Mammals, Reptiles, Birds and Fishes—those hand-books which he regarded as journeyman's work but which actually laid the foundations of zoological study—were finished in 1692 and 1694. They will be discussed in detail later. Here we need only remark that though the second of them, the Synopsis Avium et Piscium, was little more than a condensation of his two larger volumes, the first broke fresh ground and involved not only researches for which he had had little previous training, but the handling of general problems in biology and taxonomy in which he made new and very important contributions to learning.

We have already noticed the inadequacy of the definition which describes science as organised common-sense. We ought perhaps rather to define it as organised knowledge. Such a definition makes it clear that the first stage in the development of any science must necessarily be the accumulation of facts. The facts may be either particular or universal. Some sciences, such as botany and pathology, still find it important to record exceptional and unusual occurrences which at first sight appear to form exceptions to the general scheme of nature. In the more exact and more highly developed sciences, such as physics and astronomy, there are none such to record; here nature appears to be governed by immutable laws. The aim of science is to discover and interpret these laws.

Scientific Synthesis

When a sufficient number of facts have been collected in any particular branch of science, the next stage is to try and cover them all by a general principle, which may or may not admit of an explanation in terms of familiar concepts. To be ultimately satisfactory, such a general principle or explanation must not only cover all the facts already known, but also all the facts which remain to be found out. It is accordingly first put forward in the form of a hypothesis. A scientist says in effect—“Observation shews that the following facts are true; I find that a certain hypothesis as to their origin is consistent with them all”.