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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: PYR-RAY |
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RAY (or WRAY, as he wrote his name till 1670), JOHN (1628-1705) , sometimes called the father of English natural history, was the son of the blacksmith of Black Notley near Braintree in Essex, where he was born on the 29th of November 1628, or, according to other authorities, some months earlier. From Braintree school he was sent at the age of sixteen to Catharine Hall
Cambridge , whence he removed to Trinity College after about one year and three-quarters. His tutor at Trinity was Dr James Duport (1606-1679), 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 166o) ; 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 23rd of December 166o, were the famous discourses on The Wisdom of God in the Creation, and on the Chaos, 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
Ray's quiet college life closed when he found himself unable to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity of 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
bounty of his pupil Willughby
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 176o, 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 plantarum 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 (167o), which work is the basis of all later English floras. In 1667 Ray was elected a 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 (Oxford); in 1676 he went to Sutton Coldfield, and in 1677 to Falborne Hall
Ray's first book, the Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium (166o, 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 166o. 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 (167o, 1677) were likewise arranged alphabetically; but in the Synopsis stirpium Britannicarum (169o, 1696, also re-edited by Dillenius, 1724, and by Hill, 176o) Ray applied the scheme of classification which he had by that time elaborated in the Methodus and the Historia plantarum. The Methodus plant-arum 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, " Floriferas dividemus in Dicotyledones, quarum semina sata binis foliis anomalis, seminal-ibus dictis, quae cotyledonorum usum praestant, e terra exeunt, vel 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." 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
grasses
Augustus
Besides editing his friend Willughby's books, Ray wrote several zoological works of his own, including Synopsis methodica Animalium Quadrupedum et Seepentini 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 (1710), which embodied a great mass of Willughby's notes. Most of Ray's minor works were the outcome of his faculty for carefully amassing facts; for instance, his Collection of English Proverbs (167o), 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, &c., 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. AUTHORITIES: Select Remains, Itineraries and Life, by Dr Derham
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