Species

Species and the Birth of Modern Science 75

intermediate between higher and lower types, species of doubtful classication linking

one type with another and having something common with both—as for example the

so-called zoophytes between plants and animals.^121

According to Glass, Ray did allow some limited transmutation between related
species, especially hybridization, a problem that Linnaeus later also had to accom-
modate. Ray also treated species as the Aristotelian logic did, as a subordinate kind
to a superordinate genus, but he was not too strict. Raven says that he attempted

not only to formulate a correct denition and arrangement of the ‘genera’ (that is, the

large groups or orders), but to marshal correctly the ‘species subalternae’ (or genera)

and the ‘species inmae’ (or species).^122

An originator of the British natural theology tradition—he wrote the book
Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation^123 —Ray also had a problem
with extinction. It was not that he did not nd it an operational concept; it was ruled
out in terms of the principle of plenitude.^124 Initially he thought that fossil forms
would be found alive elsewhere, but later he was forced into denying that fossils were
even the remnants of living forms, but had instead grown within the rocks.
Ray is responsible for formulating the rst explicit entirely biological notion of
species, but this is not the same as saying that he presented what we would now
consider a Biological Species Concept. For him, this was a sense of “species” that
applied to reproducing forms, that is, living things. It was the rst time a concept
was proposed that applied only to the classication of living things—prior to this,
all such concepts were general-duty concepts of classication that were then applied
equally to, say, books or rocks as to life. Ray clearly saw his classicatory logic as
the continuation of the Aristotelian, scholastic, tradition, but his adherence to the
Great Chain of Being, its neo-Platonist heritage, and to the idea that there needed to
be a real essence, led him to propose not so much an operational concept as Mayr
would have it, but a metaphysical one.

(^121) Ray 1682, 2, Prefatio ad Lectorum. Quoted in Glass 1959, 35. The provenance of the saying Ray
adopts here—natura non facit saltum—is interesting. Usually associated with Linnaeus, it can be
found also in Leibniz and even, in a form, in Albertus Magnus: “nature does not make [animal]
kinds separate without making something intermediate between them, for nature does not pass from
extreme to extreme nisi per medium” [quoted in Lovejoy 1936, 79]. The idea can be traced back to the
views of Plotinus and Porphyry, and probably also to the Gnostic idea of emanation. Ray also used
similar phrases: Natura nihil facit frustra (nature makes nothing in vain) and Natura non abundant
in superfluis, nec deficit in necessarius (Nature abounds not in what is superuous, neither is [it]
decient in necessaries)—in the Wisdom of God quoted in Cain 1999, 233. This saying, adopted
much later by Darwin, is also found in a similar form in Leibniz’s New Essays: “In nature every-
thing happens by degrees, and nothing by jumps,” [Leibniz 1996, 473, Book IV, chapter xvi]. It is an
expression of the Great Chain of Being.
(^) A recent English translation of Ray’s Methodus has been published by the Ray Society [Ray 2015]
but I have been unable to access it.
(^122) Raven 1986, 219; Quoted in Lazenby 1995, 49–50, Vol. I.
(^123) Ray 1691, Gould 1993, 140. Ray says a lot about species in this work, mostly defending the constancy
of propagation from seed.
(^124) Bowler 2003, 37f.