John Ray was one of the most influential English naturalists in the seventeenth century. Born in Essex, Ray became interested in the natural world at the age of 23 following a bout of illness. He spent much of his life in Cambridge where he studied and taught a generation of naturalists, including Francis Willughby (1635-72), who would become a close friend and travel companion.

Ray spent much of his career attempting to form a universal classification system for plants and animals. This work, his Methodus plantarum was the first of his books attempting to classify plants. The system built upon earlier classifications and used a sequence of Latin words and phrases to describe different species of plant. This abridged 1703 edition focuses on his catalogue of grasses and reeds.

Ray would go on to refine his system in his three-volume Historiae Plantarum, published between 1686 and 1704. Despite its complexity, Ray’s system was very popular among English botanists until it was superseded by the binomial sexual system of Carl Linnaeus in the middle of the eighteenth century.