• Landscape view looking out across a large body of water. Land is just visible on the horizon, there is a line of trees on the shore, and in the immediate foreground there is a rough stone wall.

John Ray and Archives of Natural History

English naturalist John Ray was born in November 1627. Generally regarded as one of the earliest English parson-naturalists, he is credited as “the originator of the criterion of common parentage for conspecificity”. Ray wrote widely on botany, natural theology, taxonomy…