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He published important works on plants, animals, and natural theology. His classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum was an important step towards modern taxonomy. Ray rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a pre-conceived, either/or type system, and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation. Thus he advanced scientific empiricism against the deductive rationalism of the scholastics.
Ray was born in the village of Black Notley , near Braintree, in the county of Essex, in the south east of England. He is said to have been born in the smithyThis article is about smithing. Forge was also the name of a map editor for the Marathon computer game. See also forgery. The forge or smithy is the workplace of a smith or a blacksmith. Forging" is the term for shaping metal by use of heat and hammer., his father having been the blacksmithA blacksmith is an artisan specializing in the hand-wrought manufacture of metal objects, such as wrought iron gates, grills and railings, light fixtures and furniture, sculpture, weapons, decorative and religous items, cooking utensils and tools. Blacksm of Black Notley near BraintreeThere are several places named Braintree or a variant thereof Braintree, Essex a town in the county of Essex, in the United Kingdom Braintree, Massachusetts incorporated in 1640, on land which is now part of Braintree, Randolph, Holbrook, the City of Quin. From Braintree school he was sent at the age of sixteen to Catharine Hall, Cambridge , whence he removed to Trinity CollegeTrinity College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. Trinity is the largest and richest of the colleges in Cambridge, and is now a home to around 600 undergraduates, 300 graduates, and over 160 Fellows. after about one year and three-quarters. His tutor at Trinity was James Duport , Regius Professor of GreekThe Regius Professorship of Greek is one of the oldest and most prestigious of the professorships at the University of Cambridge. The chair was founded by Henry VIII in 1540 with a stipend of £40 per year, subsequently increased in 1848 by a canonry of El, and his intimate friend and fellow-pupil the celebrated Isaac BarrowIsaac Barrow ( 1630 May 4, 1677) was an English mathematician who is generally given minor credit for his role in the development of modern calculus; in particular, for his work regarding the tangent; for example, Barrow is given credit for being the firs. Ray was chosen minor fellow of Trinity in 1649Events January 30 King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland is beheaded. His widow Henrietta Maria resides in her native France. January 30 The Commonwealth of England, a republican form of government, replaces the monarchy as the form of government, 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 1660); 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 23 December, 1660, 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 is by far the most famous.
Ray's quiet college life closed when he found himself unable to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity 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 in his Life of Ray that the reason of his refusal,
From this time onwards he seems to have depended chiefly on the bounty of his pupil Willughby, who made Ray his constant companion while he lived, and at his death left him 6 shillings a year, with the charge of educating his two sons.
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 1760, 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 planiarurn 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 (1670), which work is the basis of all later English floras.
In 1667 Ray was elected 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 ; in 1676 he went to Sutton Coldfield, and in 1677 to Falborne Hall in Essex. Finally, in 1679, he removed to Black Notley, where he afterwards remained. His life there was quiet and uneventful, but embittered by bodily weakness and chronic sores. He occupied himself in writing books and in keeping up a wide scientific correspondence, and lived, in spite of his infirmities, to the age of seventy-six, dying at Black Notley on the 17th of January 1705. The Ray Society , for the publication of works on natural history, was founded in his honor in 1844.
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,
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.
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 J. P. de Tournefort in taking the flower instead of the fruit as his basis of classification: he was no longer a fructicist but a corollist.
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.
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.
In 1986, to mark the 300th anniversary of the publication of Ray's Historia Plantarum, there was a celebration of Ray's legacy in Braintree. A "John Ray Gallery" was opened in Braintree Museum . The curator of this is Leslie Killin .
This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopędia Britannica. 1911 Britannica
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