The return from his three years on the Continent may be said to mark the close of Ray's apprenticeship to his work in science. The tour had given him a great range of material, larger perhaps than that of any previous botanist except De l'Ecluse, and including a knowledge of animals, birds, reptiles, and fishes such as no other Englishman had ever acquired. In addition it had given him status in the world of learning and a measure of confidence in his own capacity. The shy student who in 1660 had hesitated to send a copy of his Cambridge Catalogue to Hartlib was now the friend of Hoffmann and Corneli and Marchetti, of Steno and Magnol and Marchand; and could thenceforth exchange opinions with the leaders of contemporary research on level terms. In some sense the rest of his life was the examination and exposition of the data thus obtained. Though he did in fact undertake a large amount of further field-work and never gave up the desire for it, this, except in insects and to a less extent in cryptogams, was only supplementary.

It was, as we have seen, on 18 April 1684 and after the completion of the Historia Piscium that Tancred Robinson, writing from Geneva, revived Willughby's project for a General History of Nature. The proposal in its main outline was clear—that he should produce a series of hand-books or Synopses surveying the whole order of Nature, and anticipating the work carried out in the next century by Linnaeus. According to the classification then in vogue this would have meant surveys of Animals, Reptiles, Birds, and Fishes; Exanguia, that is Cephalopods, Crustaceans, Shell-fish, and Insects; Plants; and Fossils—these including Minerals as well as ‘formed stones’. Ray had got the material for some of these: to condense the Ornithology and the Ichthyology and even the Plants would not be a very serious business. But to deal with Animals and Reptiles was to break new ground; and the rest, except for some small notes of Insects, were wholly untouched. We have seen that he very rapidly put together the Synopsis Stirpium Britannicarum and followed it up with the Sylloge Europeanarum.

‘A good book needs no preface; a bad book deserves none.’ That is no doubt true. But when a student of theology turns aside (as it would seem) from his proper concern, when a normally active citizen in the middle of a great war fills much of his time with the life and work of a naturalist of the seventeenth century, it is reasonable that he should give some account of his eccentricity. Hence this personal explanation.

The history of science, with every respect for Mr Crowther and even Dr Hogben, has not yet been written. Nor in these days, when the use and abuse of scientific achievements are so significant, can the subject be regarded as unimportant. But my concern is not with the general record of man's discovery of the scientific method or of his application of it to the service of his needs and ambitions, so much as with one consequence of those events. As a theologian my primary task long ago convinced me of the importance of the change in man's aesthetic, moral and religious outlook which had accompanied and in large measure inspired the scientific movement. It was plain to me as a parson that the mixed folk whom I met as an entomologist and a bird-watcher had found an interest in nature which was singularly rich in educative and recreational value.

The move from Middleton, though it released Ray from other ties and on his mother's death enabled him to devote twenty-five years to study and writing, had one serious effect. It cut him off from the collections and notes gathered during his continental tour, from books and other aids to his work. In the same letter to Aubrey he had written: ‘Mr Willughby's library remains at his house at Middleton for the use of his son and heir’, and when he was publishing the History of Fishes he complained that it was now impossible for him to get at the records or material. Later on Sloane was very good in sending him literature: the Braintree carrier was constantly taking parcels to and fro into which the kindly Irishman would put a present of sugar for the family. But the want of access to other books tended to confine Ray to botany, where he had a library of his own which he had refused even in the years of his homelessness to part with.

As soon as the Ornithology was off his hands Ray turned to his second task, and in December 1674 wrote to Lister:

In these days when we all realise the importance of heredity and early environment in determining and in interpreting character, the student or John Ray will deplore more strongly than did any of his biographers our almost total ignorance of his parents and childhood. To Derham or to Dale the fact that he was the son of a village blacksmith had to be stated but should then be forgotten. It was unconventional if not indecent. They knew it; but neither they nor their successors thought it necessary to amplify it. For more than a century the year of his birth, though correctly given in at least one of his books, was wrongly stated as 1628; until 1847 no one had taken the trouble to search the parish register, and even then he was sometimes identified with the wrong John Ray. W.H. Mullens, who discovered that he had been baptised twelve months before the traditional time, did not prosecute his researches further or spend the few hours needed to run through the long vellum pages that form the scanty annals of Black Notley in the first half of the seventeenth century.

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.