John Ray Research Articles

John Ray in Italy: lost manuscripts rediscovered.

This paper discloses the content of two manuscripts of John Ray that have hitherto been unknown to Ray scholars. The manuscripts survive in the Hampshire Record Office, having descended through the Prideaux-Brune family. They record information about Ray's tour of Italy in the 1660s that does not appear in his Observations... made in a journey through... the Low-countries, Germany, Italy and France (1673), including a visit to the museum of Athanasius Kircher in Rome, and provide clues concerning the composition of Ray's 1673 book.

Aggressive Tendencies: Lolita and the Conscripted Reader

This essay reads Lolita within the broader context of midcentury advice literature intended to manage marriage, parenting, and sexuality. Moving away from critiques that read the novel as a parody of the prescriptive genre, Wilhite argues that Humbert’s narrative and what Nabokov calls the “aesthetic bliss” of his novel are consistent with a cultural incitement to classify sexual practices and identities for an uneasy readership. Devotees of parenting guides and marriage manuals turn to such works in search of answers, and Humbert knows that readers of his confessional narrative are also on a quest for information—to learn the salacious details of his affair with Lolita. In similar ways, Lolita and prescriptive literature depend on the presence of a curious and conscripted reader, and from John Ray Jr.’s Foreword to Nabokov’s “On a Book Entitled Lolita ,” the novel sustains a hyper-vigilant awareness of, and apprehension about, its audience. This balancing act between curiosity and control suggests a new framework for understanding how Lolita exercises power over, and exhibits aggressive tendencies toward, its sexually inquisitive and anxious readers.

Resolution of the type material of the Asian elephant,Elephas maximusLinnaeus, 1758 (Proboscidea, Elephantidae)

The understanding of Earth's biodiversity depends critically on the accurate identification and nomenclature of species. Many species were described centuries ago, and in a surprising number of cases their nomenclature or type material remain unclear or inconsistent. A prime example is provided by Elephas maximus, one of the most iconic and well-known mammalian species, described and named by Linnaeus (1758) and today designating the Asian elephant. We used morphological, ancient DNA (aDNA), and high-throughput ancient proteomic analyses to demonstrate that a widely discussed syntype specimen of E. maximus, a complete foetus preserved in ethanol, is actually an African elephant, genus Loxodonta. We further discovered that an additional E. maximus syntype, mentioned in a description by John Ray (1693) cited by Linnaeus, has been preserved as an almost complete skeleton at the Natural History Museum of the University of Florence. Having confirmed its identity as an Asian elephant through both morphological and ancient DNA analyses, we designate this specimen as the lectotype of E. maximus. The mass spectrometry proteomics data have been deposited in the ProteomeXchange Consortium with the data set identifier PXD000423. © 2013 The Linnean Society of London

The Voyage Account, the Royal Society and Textual Production, 1687–1707

The decade following the Glorious Revolution in England saw the publication of many accounts of voyages both to the New World and the Levant. Key figures behind these publications were botanists Hans Sloane, John Ray and Tancred Robinson, who collaborated on the publication of two texts – A Collection of Curious Voyages and Travels, which collated journeys to the Levant, and An Account of Several Late Voyages, which featured accounts of voyages to the Arctic Circle as well as the Pacific. This article argues that the publication of voyage accounts in the late-seventeenth century was part of a broader scientific endeavour. They provided both entertainment, and raw material for scientific and religious debate. By examining the publication and reception history of key accounts of voyages and travel, this article shows how the ‘republic of letters’ became a textual empire at the end of the seventeenth century.

Systems and How Linnaeus Looked at Them in Retrospect

Summary A famous debate between John Ray, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and Augustus Quirinus Rivinus at the end of the seventeenth century has often been referred to as signalling the beginning of a rift between classificatory methods relying on logical division and classificatory methods relying on empirical grouping. Interestingly, a couple of decades later, Linnaeus showed very little excitement in reviewing this debate, and this although he was the first to introduce the terminological distinction of artificial vs. natural methods. In this paper, I will explain Linnaeus's indifference by the fact that earlier debates were revolving around problems of plant diagnosis rather than classification. From Linnaeus's perspective, they were therefore concerned with what he called artificial methods alone – diagnostic tools, that is, which were artificial no matter which characters were taken into account. The natural method Linnaeus proposed, on the other hand, was not about diagnosis, but about relations of equivalence which played a vital, although largely implicit role in the practices of specimen exchange on which naturalists relied to acquire knowledge of the natural world.

“Who is the Almighty that We should serve Him?” Chaos, Providence and Natural Philosophy in Stephen Hales

This article argues that the chemical and physiological experiments undertaken by the natural philosopher Stephen Hales (1677–1761) constituted a reformulation of providential matter theory. Hales was responding to a continuing debate about the position of chaos in the natural world between Newtonians like Samuel Clarke, who posited chaos as oppositional to immediate providential direction, and those such as John Ray and Bernard Nieuwentyt, who argued that nature was a chaos of operations, organised by divinely endowed but innate principles. Vegetable Staticks (1727) represents an attempted solution, arguing that a chaos of operations could support life only if it was concurrent with God's direction. Subsequently criticised by the Irish theologian Peter Browne for indulging frivolity, Hales responded in Haemastatics (1733) by auditing how spirituous liquor precipitated a bodily disintegration from the chaos of operations into a destructive chaos. Hales’ subsequent campaign against spirits should be read as an extension of his experimental philosophy as a moral tool.

Naturalia : the history of natural history and medicine in the seventeenth century

In 1712 the poet Elkanah Settle (1648–1724) published a funeral poem, Threnodia Apollinaris , dedicated to the memory of Dr Martin Lister.[1][1] Settle had a good deal of material to draw upon, because Lister had been Vice-President of the Royal Society, a physician to Queen Anne, and the first

Attending to insects: Francis Willughby and John Ray

Francis Willughby and John Ray were at the forefront of the natural history of insects in the second half of the seventeenth century. Willughby in particular had a deep interest in insects' metamorphosis, behaviour and diversity, an interest that he passed on to his friend and mentor Ray. By examining Willughby's contributions to John Wilkins's Essay towards a Real Character (1668) and Ray's Methodus insectorum (1705) and Historia insectorum (1710), which contained substantial material from Willughby's manuscript history of insects, one may reconstruct how the two naturalists studied insects, their innovative use of metamorphosis in insect classification, and the sheer diversity of insect forms that they described on the basis of their own collections and those of London and Oxford virtuosi. Imperfect as it was, Historia insectorum was recognized by contemporaries as a significant contribution to the emerging field of entomology.

‘Vividness’ in english natural history and anatomy, 1650–1700

This article concerns the use of rhetorical strategies in the natural historical and anatomical works of the seventeenth-century Royal Society. Choosing representative works, it argues that naturalists such as Nehemiah Grew, John Ray and the neuroanatomist Thomas Willis used the rhetorical device known as ‘comparison’ to make their descriptions of natural things vivid. By turning to contemporary works of neurology such as Willis's Cerebri Anatome and contemporary rhetorical works inspired by other such descriptions of the brain and nerves, it is argued that the effects of these strategies were taken to be wide-ranging. Contemporaries understood the effects of rhetoric in terms inflected by anatomical and medical discourse—the brain was physically altered by powerful sense impressions such as those of rhetoric. I suggest that the rhetoric of natural history could have been understood in the same way and that natural history and anatomy might therefore have been understood to cultivate the mind, improving its capacity for moral judgements as well as giving it knowledge of nature.

The debt of John Ray and Martin Lister to Guillaume Rondelet of Montpellier

The fame of its medical university and its reputation for field botany attracted visitors from all over Europe to seventeenth-century Montpellier. It was there that Martin Lister first made the acquaintance of John Ray in 1665. Twenty years later, in London, they cooperated in the production of the ambitious and lavishly illustrated Historia Piscium based on the notes of the late Francis Willughby. Ray, Lister and others contributed additional material. In their own work on fishes, cetaceans and shellfish Ray and Lister were considerably indebted to the Libri de piscibus marinis of an earlier Montpellier professor, Guillaume Rondelet, whose Aristotelian/Galenic approach to the study of medicine and living things was distinguished by a quite exceptional level of knowledge about aquatic species, based on a secure grasp of the classical and contemporary literature, but above all on his own observations in rivers, lakes, lagoons and the open sea, and his domestication (and dissection) of marine species in ponds and aquaria at his country house. Rondelet's book proved useful to Ray and to Lister as a work of reference, as a stimulus for reflection on biological problems, as an aid to nomenclature, as a source of precise descriptions of species, in both words and pictures, as a model to be improved upon in taxonomy, as a warning against reliance on hearsay, and as a valuable account of observations and experiments. Ray used it in much the same way as he used the work of those sixteenth-century botanists who met with his approval. Several of these had been Rondelet's pupils.

A copy of John Ray's Cambridge catalogue (1660) presented by the author to Peter Courthope

A copy of John Ray's Cambridge catalogue (1660) presented by the author to Peter Courthope

Publicando Lolita. Comentário do Prefácio de John Ray, Jr., Ph.D

O artigo considera o “ato” de publicação de um modo amplo, ou seja, como um “processo” de publicação, que envolve vários estágios, desde a formação e habilidade linguística do escritor, passando pela publicação material do livro e estratégias para evitar censura e processos judiciais, até a recepção pela crítica e público; a ênfase deste artigo, no entanto, recai na análise do ato de publicação e de escrita enquanto mencionados ou aludidos na própria narrativa, ou seja, enquanto entretecidos na própria realidade ficcional. Assim, partindo-se do comentário do Prefácio de Lolita, assinado por John Ray, Jr., ph. D., são apresentadas estratégias argumentativas dos autores ficcionais em favor da não proibição do livro, bem como alguns importantes aspectos da intrincada relação entre, por um lado, John Ray Jr. e Humbert Humbert, dois escritores imanentes à própria trama narrativa, e, por outro, o autor signatário, Vladimir Nabokov, expondo, entre outras coisas, a consciência da ousadia de sua aposta literária frente ao público da “era da classe média enxerida”, bem como sua confiança nos promissores resultados da publicação de Lolita.

John Ray, physico-theology and afterwards

Ray's most widely read book was his Wisdom of God manifested in the works of creation (1691), probably based on addresses given in the chapel of Trinity College Cambridge 20 years previously. In it he forswore the use of allegory in biblical interpretation, just as he had done in his (and Francis Willughby's) Ornithology (1678). His discipline seeped into theology, complementing the influence of the Reformers and weakening Enlightenment assumptions about teleology, thus softening the hammer-blows of Darwinism on Deism. The physico-theology of the eighteenth century and the popularity of Gilbert White and the like survived the squeezing of natural theology by Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises a century after Wisdom … , and contributed to a peculiarly British understanding of natural theology. This undergirded the subsequent impact of the results of the voyagers and geologists and prepared the way for a modern reading of God's “Book of Works” (“Darwinism … under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend”).Natural theology is often assumed to have been completely discredited by Darwin (as well as condemned by Barth and ridiculed by Dawkins). Notwithstanding, and despite the vapours of vitalism (ironically urged – among others – by Ray's biographer, Charles Raven) and the current fashion for “intelligent design”, the attitudes encouraged by Wisdom … still seem to be robust, albeit needing constant re-tuning (as in all understandings influenced by science).

John Ray, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of

John Ray, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of

Marginalia, commonplaces, and correspondence: Scribal exchange in early modern science

In recent years, historians of science have increasingly turned their attention to the “print culture” of early modern science. These studies have revealed that printing, as both a technology and a social and economic system, structured the forms and meanings of natural knowledge. Yet in early modern Europe, naturalists, including John Aubrey, John Evelyn, and John Ray, whose work is discussed in this paper, often shared and read scientific texts in manuscript either before or in lieu of printing. Scribal exchange, exemplified in the circulation of writings like commonplace books, marginalia, manuscript treatises, and correspondence, was the primary means by which communities of naturalists constructed scientific knowledge. Print and manuscript were necessary partners. Manuscript fostered close collaboration, and could be circulated relatively cheaply; but, unlike print, it could not reliably secure priority or survival for posterity. Naturalists approached scribal and print communication strategically, choosing the medium that best suited their goals at any given moment. As a result, print and scribal modes of disseminating information, constructing natural knowledge, and organizing communities developed in tandem. Practices typically associated with print culture manifested themselves in scribal texts and exchanges, and vice versa. “Print culture” cannot be hived off from “scribal culture.” Rather, in their daily jottings and exchanges, naturalists inhabited, and produced, one common culture of communication.

Nabokov's Experiments and the Nature of Fictionality

The case of a character in a novel bearing the name or likeness of its nonfi ctional creator dramatizes the fault line that separates fi ction from nonfi ction, a distinction more durable than many care to acknowledge yet not as unbridgeable as others would aver. We can get a sense of what is at stake in this distinction by glancing at the way Nabokov begins his afterword, “On a Book Entitled Lolita”: “After doing my impersonation of the suave John Ray, the character in Lolita who pens the Foreword, any comments coming straight from me may strike one—may strike me, in fact—as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book” (1970: 313). One of the great intellectual achievements of modern narrative theory was to establish a fundamental differentiation between the narrator and the author and to ensure that the positions advocated by the one are not simplistically and erroneously pred-

John Ray, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of

John Ray, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of

How stupid not to have thought of that: post‐copulatory sexual selection

Science progresses through ideas or hypotheses; novel ways of viewing the world. If those ideas survive testing, then they are considered ‘the truth’, or more crucially, truth-for-now, for the essence of science is that if a new idea provides a better explanation of the way the world is, the truth changes. Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural selection, published as the Origin in 1859, replaced the earlier truth of physico- or natural-theology introduced by John Ray in 1691. Despite resistance by the church, Darwin’s truth gained widespread acceptance, in part due to the efforts of T. H. Huxley, who on reading the Origin said ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!’ Despite natural selection’s enormous explanatory power, there were certain phenomena it apparently could not explain, including female promiscuity. It was only in the 1960s when natural selection was viewed as operating explicitly on individuals (rather than populations or groups), that this changed. Rather than being a cooperative venture between the sexes, sexual reproduction was now viewed in terms of conflicts of interests, and in so doing provided an explanation for female promiscuity (albeit in a male-biased sort of way). Until this point, sexual selection had been concerned exclusively with mate acquisition. With an evolutionary perspective focussing on individuals, it was recognized that sexual selection might continue after insemination, and that rather than competing for partners, males compete for fertilizations. Later it was acknowledged that females, through cryptic processes can also influence the outcome of sperm competition. Today, post-copulatory sexual selection provides explanations for many previously bewildering reproductive traits, including the extraordinary diversity in male and female genitalia, the design of spermatozoa and ova, of seminal fluid and of copulation behaviour itself

The Work of Verbal Picturing for John Ray and Some of his Contemporaries

By far the largest part of Nehemiah Grew’s account of a seventeenth‐century collection of rarities, his Musæum Regalis Societatis (1685) is taken up with ‘thick’, verbal descriptions of things in the Royal Society’s repository. Not only, Grew suggests, do his descriptions serve to signify the contents of his collection, but they enable us to discern among species and to think about the collection’s pieces in new ways. Verbal descriptions did not just signify things in the Royal Society’s collection, but had the capacity to alter their meanings. The essay discusses the ‘picturing’ of natural things in Early Modern Europe with little direct reference to the contemporary media of graphic representation – drawings, engravings, paintings etc. – in order to highlight the role of the then most widely used, but now least discussed of these media, verbal descriptions.

Voltaire this ain’t

I think the only literary genre more frivolous than theologians writing about science (Teilhard de Chardin 1959) is scientists writing about theology (Miller 1999; Dennett 2006; Collins 2006; Roughgarden 2006). This latter group has now devolved into two camps: some scientists find it reasonable to seek spiritual meaning in the natural world, inheriting the centuries-old ambitions of John Ray and William Paley. The less pious also write about it, although with different goals. While the devout are trying to reconcile their beliefs about the non-material universe to the domain of science, the less devout are trying to convince them that they are idiots, a somewhat less respectable ambition, even if just as likely to be unsuccessful. Richard Dawkins, recently retired Oxford professor of the Public Understanding of Science and one of the leading voices of contemporary Darwinism, aggressively links science, and particularly evolutionary science, to his evangelical atheism. The result is a best-selling screed and an eloquent testimony to the poverty and problems of modern science education. I will discuss the book in terms of several critical paradoxes it raised for me. Science, as a set of tools for producing reliable knowledge of the natural world, is a product of seventeenth-century European minds. Its most fundamental assumption is that despite critical points of contact, there is some sort of basic division between Nature and Supernature, the former being governed by matter and law, and the latter by spirit and miracle. The uniqueness of that underlying assumption?that the natural and supernatural realms are basically distinct and separable from one