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John Ray

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A page for John Ray

Stephensonia

When Enoch Root tried to explain to Clarke the Apothecary what the future was cooking up in regards to the art — it seems Ray would have been a good example of an empiricist.

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Enhanced Wikipedia: John Ray

John Ray (November 29, 1627 - January 17, 1705) was an English naturalist. 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 smithy, his father having been the local blacksmith.

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. He also struggled with determining the true nature of fossils.

"John Ray laid the foundations of botany and zoology in Britain. The botanical terms ‘petal’ and ‘pollen’ were first used by Ray, and he was the first botanist to distinguish between monocotyledons and dicotyledons. Ray’s Historia Plantarum was the first textbook of modern botany. In systematic classification he had no successor until Linnaeus. In his efforts to understand plant and animal form and behaviour he was ahead of Linnaeus and there was no successor to Ray until the 19th century. Later scientists recognised his significance very clearly. [1]

"Ray's theology is strikingly different from modern biological thought. Yet his goal of a natural system of classification inspired Linnaeus, and generations of systematists after Linnaeus, to collect, document, and classify organisms; Ray's work began to bring order to the study of species. Ray's use of total morphology to classify organisms would become a powerful tool in the hands of evolutionary biologists trying to infer evolutionary relationships. Ray's insight that fossils were once living organisms was a significant advance over most other theories of his time, and his prophetic questions as to what fossils might indicate about the Earth's age and history would be taken up by generations of paleontologists. Natural theology remained an influential doctrine for well over a century after Ray's death; inspiring naturalists to look at form in the context of function, it laid the groundwork for evolutionary studies of adaptation and fitness. Many of the 19th-century natural historians who influenced Darwin, such as Agassiz, Paley, Sedgwick, and Buckland, were followers of natural theology or strongly influenced by it." [2]

Historia Plantarum

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. John Ray Gallery Causeway House Bocking End Braintree CM7 6HB

  1. What did he do?
  2. John Ray
  3. The John Ray Institute
  4. Ray and Fossils