Science Saturday-John Ray Taxonomy Naturalist.

Charlie Keeble continues his popular Science Saturday series for the Havering Daily with another eccentric Essex man. This time it’s the story of John Ray who laid the groundwork for modern botany and zoology with taxonomy.

John Ray was born in Black Notley, just outside Braintree in 1627. His father was a blacksmith and his mother was aherbalist. On nature walks she took John on field trips around the area where he developed a fascination with the different plants and animals. As a herbalist she collected plants and used them to make medicines at home. It was from here that John a broad understanding of the differences in plants and their uses. What intrigued him the most about though was how they were taxonomically catalogued and put into order. 

Taxonomy is the system of cataloguing and organising plants and animals according to their similarities and differences to one another. Like the differences in trees with one type bearing fruit like apples and the other bearing nuts like oak. John actively studied about taxonomic systems at school and earned a reputation for being a methodical and orderly student. At 16 he got a scholarship to Trinity College,Cambridge where he studied languages Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Later he became a lecturer at the university where he also actively researched natural sciences towards his life’s work.

What John Ray found from reading about taxonomy in his time was that the ordered structure of plants was not recorded in a straightforward way. All the botany textbooks that were available showed the plants that were present in nature were all there to see, but they were not described according to any specific component parts to compare them to others. There was too much duplication and obscure description in their listings which made it hard to distinguish between plants and trees.

The whole taxonomic system was a disorganised mess and that was a problem that Ray wanted to tackle. He began an attempt to streamline the taxonomy system by writing a catalogue of the plants around Cambridge called the Cambridge Catalogue. Now Ray made this possible by inventing an entirely new standard in descriptive botany. He rejected the herbalist style of plant ordering used since Aristotle’s time, and made them organised using the mystical associations with the plants and applied their scientific features to their listings. These scientific features involved the plant’s structure and habits, it’s anatomy and it’s physiology. 

Here is an example of the list of trees in Cambridge from the catalogue divided into 8 classes: 1. Trees bearing fruits without stones: Apple, Lemon, Fig.2. Trees bearing fruits with stones: Plum, Peach, Date-palm, Olive.3. Trees with nuts: Walnut, Chestnut.4. Trees with berries: Laurel, Mulberry, Juniper, Elder. 5. Trees with acorns: Oak, Ilex, Beech.6. Trees with cones: Pine, Fir, Larch.7. Trees with pods: Laburnum, Judas tree. 8. All other trees which included those with catkins (Hornbeam, Willow), membraned seeds (Ash, Sycamore, Elm, Lime) and infertile trees (woodland). 

The Cambridge Catalogue was published in 1660 and it became John Ray’s first botanical book. He went on to write many other books on botany, and later zoology and theology making the first ever extensive books about English plants. His method of taxonomy became the standard for which future botanists and zoologists followed in recording their specimens. Including Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin. He also used Latin names for the plants becoming the first person to do so, which is still in use today. Allowing each living object to be named individually and distinctly from one another.

This picture (above) shows two sets of trees in Langton’s Gardens in March 2022. 

Ray also invented other methods of studying plants that may surprise people who like to explore nature. In the Cambridge Catalogue it is revealed that he was the one who invented the method of measuring the age of a tree, by counting the rings in a tree’s trunk to see how it grew. The number of rings in the tree’s trunk equals the number of years of the tree that it has lived. The contrasting shades of brown and yellow in the rings shows the wet and dry seasons the tree went through. The Yellow rings indicate wet raining seasons and are thick because of the amount of water the tree has accumulated. Thebrown rings are thin and they indicate dry arid seasons. The shape of the tree is also influenced by the weather it experiences as it grows and the geographical location and climate allows for certain types of trees to be grown there. 

Later in 1682 Ray wrote another botany book called New Method of Plants in which he gave a new definition of plant structures. In this book he gave the parts of flowers new terminology. This was wherein he invented the name ‘petal’ to describe the coloured leaves of flowers. In modern botany petals are recognised as important features in describing plants. Thanks to John Ray we can now grow plants anywhere in any soil for our gardens by recreating their natural habitats in plots. In this book he gave more features and characteristics to define plants that rely on three significant things: 1. The locality of the plant2. The plant’s use as a drug or food 3. The likeness and principle parts of the plant: root, flower, cup, seed and vessel

Now the third one here is very important to make the perfect flower. A flower is perfect if it has petals, stamens and style. Style is the structure found within the flower, which consists of the stalk connected to the stigma and ovary that allows for self reproduction. If it has one less of these features then the flower is imperfect. Petals have a very useful function to flowers. As well as making the flowers pretty they surround the reproductive parts of the flower to protect it’s ability to reproduce, and provide a food source for birds and bees to gather pollen.

Later in 1686 John Ray also gave the most accurate biological description of species. He did this in the first volume of three part encyclopaedia called History of Plants that was made with the assistance of the Royal Society. This has become the widely accepted scientific description of species as “a group of morphologically similar organisms arising from a common ancestor”. 

John Ray carried on studying plants until the end of his life and gave Essex a reputation for being a county of cultivating knowledge for growth. He passed away in 1705 with a wealth of knowledge still yet to be released. In his hometown of Black Notley there is a memorial and a blue plaque honouring his legacy. There is also the Ray Society based at the Natural History Museum where I have been to see their collection of Ray’s original works. 

His friends gathered all his scientific papers and taxonomic catalogues and published them posthumously. One of these friends was also another Essex genius called William Derham, who lived very locally to Havering in St Lawrence Church in Upminster. His story comes next.