The Watch on the Heath: Science and Religion before Darwin. Keith Thomson

look to it as a mechanism by which at least some of the different species might have arisen, and also for those who believed that God had created each species perfectly, fixed for ever in time and space.

      Throughout his extremely productive career as a natural scientist, scratching out a living from writing study after scholarly study elucidating the patterns of nature, John Ray remained all the while faithful and true to his religious beliefs, all the time devoted to the central premise that nature was the handiwork of God and that species were immutable. In thirty years of studies and travels he had revolutionised ‘natural science’ (botany and zoology), almost single-handedly moving it from a medieval to modern mode. And, while his religious life had been curtailed by his formal separation from the Church, his instincts as a teacher and preacher remained. Relatively late in his career he turned back to write out his philosophy as a Christian and a scientist. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation,45