Species

Species and the Birth of Modern Science 77

HERB consid. accord. to the

L E A F. X

FLOWER. XI

SEED-VESSEL. XII

SHRUB. XIII

TREE. XIV

Sensitive;

EXANGUIOUS. XV

Sanguineous;

FISH. XVI

BIRD. XVII

BEAST. XVIII

Parts.

PECULIAR. XIX.

GENERAL. XX

Wilkins was connected to the so-called “Cambridge Platonists,” a neo-Platonic

school that was directly and indirectly responsible for inspiring much scientic

work done in Britain at the time, and by whom the Royal Society was inuenced.

The neo-Platonic element is obvious in Wilkins’ use of privative classes (“imper-

fect,” “exanguious”) and yet he classes organisms on the Aristotelian theory of veg-

etative and sensitive properties. Overall he changes the ten Aristotelian categories

to “forty Genus’s.”

Like Wilkins, Ray was also inuenced by Ralph Cudworth, whose ideas were

consciously in the school of Plotinus and Porphyry. In addition, Ray had received

the standard Tr iviu m education (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric) that was presented

at the grammar schools of the time, and which at sixteen and a half he began also

to receive from Cambridge. With his friend and mentor Henry More, Ray was thor-

oughly inculcated in the techniques and terminology of the older scholastic logic.

Although he accepted the scala naturae, he nevertheless held to the xity of species

since creation, a view that he bequeathed to Linnaeus. That Ray held to xity of spe-

cies as created by God is illustrated by this comment, made in a letter:

... the number of species being in nature certain and determinate, as is generally

acknowledged by philosophers, and might be proved also by divine authority, God

having nished his works of creation, that is, consummated the number of species in

six days.^129

Nehemiah Grew: The Essence of Species

Almost contemporaneous with Ray was Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712), who under-

took to bring the anatomical studies of plants under the scope of microscopic stud-

ies. Grew knew Ray, and also John Wilkins (to whom his Anatomy is dedicated).

His notion of species was fairly standard, but what is remarkable, apart from the

exquisite gures of cell structure, in his treatment is his justication of the use of

classication as a way of making inductive generalizations. The anatomy of plants

(^129) Quoted in Greene 1959, 131. See also “Mr Ray on the Number of Plants” in Derham 1718, 344–351.