JOHN RAY, NATURALIST

Abstract

NO one who studies with attention the historical development of biology can be long in doubt as to the place to be assigned to John Ray. It may be, as Dr. Raven suggests, that his name is not so well known to present-day biologists as it was to those who founded the Ray Society a hundred years ago ; but, if so, it must be because the present-day biologist tends regrettably to be uninterested in the history of his science and, no less regrettably, to regard classification as no concern of his. Not that Ray imagined, as Linnaeus did, that systematics was the end and aim of natural history ; but to the botanists and zoologists of the seventeenth century, faced by the bewildering variety of living things, classification was the primary and most pressing need. Ray approached the problem in a spirit in many ways surprisingly modern. Others had arranged animals and plants as fitted the subject under discussion, geographically, ecologically, or on the basis of their utility to man. It was Ray who first clearly expressed the conception of a 'natural' classification based solely on structural resemblances and differences ; it was he who first discussed the still unanswered question : 'What is a species ?' It is true that he had no inkling of a genealogical basis for classification, but no one had in the seventeenth century.

John Ray, Naturalist

His Life and Works. By the Rev. Dr. Charles E. Raven. Pp. xix + 502. (Cambridge : At the University Press, 1942.) 30s. net.