• Watercolour landscape showing a coastline with building and mine shafts dotted along the shore. In the background there are fields leading to hills.

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…