John Ray - London, England, UK
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 51° 31.131 W 000° 07.573
30U E 699376 N 5711441
John Ray (1627-1705) was a prominent English botanist and natural scientist.
Waymark Code: WMDG9Q
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 01/12/2012
Views: 5
This bust of John Ray appears to be slightly larger than life-size. The materials are not listed...and may be marble. The artist is Louis-Francois Roubiliac (1702-1762)- a French sculptor who worked in London. The work depicts Ray as a middle-aged man with long hair and a mustache. He wears a scarf and coat over his shirt...and has the appearance that he is listening to someone in the near distance.
Wikipedia (
visit link) informs us:
" He published important works on botany, zoology, and natural theology. His classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum, was an important step towards modern taxonomy. Ray rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a pre-conceived, either/or type system, and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation. Thus he advanced scientific empiricism against the deductive rationalism of the scholastics. He was the first to give a biological definition of the term species...
Ray's works were directly influential on the development of taxonomy by Carl Linnaeus. In 1844, the Ray Society was founded, named after John Ray, and has since published over 160 books on natural history."