John Ray (1627–1705) was an English naturalist widely regarded as one of the founders of modern botany and ecology. A highly respected naturalist during his time, Ray revolutionized the taxonomy field by creating a system that classified plants and animals based on their physical characteristics. In addition to his botanical work, he authored numerous publications on various subjects, including animals, plants, philosophy, and theology.
Born in Black Notley, near Braintree, Essex, Ray was educated at Cambridge and became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1649. However, after the Restoration, he lost his post in 1662 when he refused to take the oath to the Act of Uniformity. Accompanied and supported by a wealthy former pupil and fellow naturalist, Francis Willoughby, he toured extensively in Europe (1662–66,) studying botany and zoology.
Ray originated the basic principles of plant classification into cryptogams, monocotyledons, and dicotyledons in his pioneering Catalogus Plantarum Angliae (1670) and Methodus Plantarum Nova (1682.) His major work was Historia Generalis Plantarum (3 vols., 1686–1704,) and his Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691) was immensely influential in its time. His zoological work, in which he developed the most natural pre-Linnaean classification of the animal kingdom, has been considered of even greater importance than his botanical achievements.
Ray’s contribution to botany, which has withstood the test of time, is establishing species as the fundamental unit of taxonomy. During the last decade, he dedicated himself to a groundbreaking exploration of insects, eventually published as Historia Insectorum after his death.
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Industry is fortunes right hand, and frugality its left.
—John Ray
Topics: Work
Never meet trouble half-way.
—John Ray
Topics: Trouble, Anxiety
A child may have too much of his mother’s blessing.
—John Ray
Topics: Children
Manners make often fortunes.
—John Ray
Topics: Manners
The charitable give out at the door, and God puts in at the window.
—John Ray
Topics: Charity
Diseases are the tax on pleasures.
—John Ray
Topics: Advice, Disease
Guilt is always jealous.
—John Ray
Topics: Guilt, One liners
They who scatter with one hand, gather with two, not always in coin, but in kind. Nothing multiplies so much as kindness.
—John Ray
Topics: Benevolence
Two of a trade seldom agree.
—John Ray
Money was made for the free-hearted and generous.
—John Ray
Topics: Money
A talkative person runs himself into great inconveniences by babbling out his own and other’s secrets.
—John Ray
Topics: Talking
He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.
—John Ray
Topics: Writing, Words
There are no better cosmetics than a severe temperance and purity, modesty and humility, a gracious temper and calmness of spirit; and there is no true beauty without the signatures of these graces in the very countenance.
—John Ray
Topics: Beauty
Many without punishment, none without sin.
—John Ray
Topics: Punishment
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