There has been nothing short of a historiographic revolution concerning the role of natural history in the development of the ‘new science’ in the seventeenth century. Instead of the emphasis on the usual (and still centrally important) trio of mathematical physics, astronomy and matter-theory, we are now realizing that natural history was essential to what Harold Cook has called the ‘big science’ of the early modern period. With ever-increasing numbers of specimens of plants and animals arriving from the New World, early modern Europe faced its first bio-information crisis. At first, natural historians were solely interested in collecting a wide variety of species, describing and comparing them to grasp the wondrous diversity and beauty of Nature. But natural history was not just about describing flora and fauna – by the seventeenth century, new species required new systems of classification. Francis Bacon advocated the assembling of vast amounts of data about the natural world, creating what he called natural histories. According to the Baconian method, once all of the facts were collected they were to be ordered into reference tables to facilitate speculation upon the phenomenon being considered. Once all the facts about, for example, a particular type of beetle or occurrences of heat were gathered, then the natural philosopher would be in a position to develop theories about them. Taxonomic schemes were thus paramount in the minds of natural philosophers in the seventeenth century.

One of the most important contributors to these classification schemes, or, to use the words of Brian Ogilvie, the ‘science of describing’, was John Ray (1627–1705). Ray's Methodus Plantarum Nova (1682) was the first work to classify plants into monocotyledons, which have one leaf when in seed embryo, and dicotyledons, which have two, a distinction used by botanists today. Ray's emphasis on seeds in his taxonomic system later came into ‘full flower’ in his Historia Plantarum (1686), where he stated,

In other words, species were sets of individuals who give rise through reproduction to new individuals that are similar to them.

Before these works for which he was most remembered were completed, Ray began his botanical studies with his Cambridge Catalogue (1660), a flora of Cambridgeshire, the first for an English county. P.H. Oswald and C.D. Preston, a trained classicist and a botanist respectively, have done us a great service in providing the first complete annotated translation of Ray's work. We are treated to a fine gazetteer of the locality records mentioned in the Catalogue, invaluable to field botanists, but also to historians of geography and landscape. The contributions of John Nidd, Peter Courthope, Peter Dent and Martin Lister to Ray's botanical work are well delineated, and Oswald and Preston's discussion of the books in the Cambridge libraries that were part of Ray's intellectual life whilst he was at Trinity College is invaluable.

Although A.H. Ewen and C.T. Prime's Ray's Flora of Cambridgeshire (1975) gave ‘easy access to the portions of the text of interest to most field botanists’ (p. 2), they left out sections of great interest to the historian of science such as Ray's chapters on the interpretation of technical terms and etymology. Oswald and Preston have gone far to rectify these omissions. This is particularly true with their translation and annotation of Ray's etymology in the Catalogus, which is lucid and engaging. Not only does the etymology give insights into the classical and humanist sources from which Ray drew for his innovative work in botany, but it also clearly shows Ray's enduring interest in words and their origins. Here we find that Ray speculated that the Pythagorean cult's prohibition on eating beans ultimately came from a poem of Empedocles, which contained the line ‘Wretched, all-wretched ones, keep your hands away from beans’. Ray continued, ‘For most people have believed that cyamos [beans] generally means a pulse, but those who have thought more diligently and carefully about the poems of Empedocles say that … in this passage [it] means testicles … and an excess of affairs of Passion’ (p. 377). My own work with correspondence between Martin Lister and Ray indeed indicates that Ray worried about such matters when he later married Margaret Oakley.

Delightful as such revelations were, I would have welcomed more analysis from Oswald and Preston linking Ray's foray into botanical linguistics in the Catalogue to his later Collection of English Proverbs (1670), and Collection of English words (1674). Because Ray also contributed to John Wilkins's attempts to devise a universal language from first principles, trying to fit animal and plant species into Wilkins's awkward and predetermined structure, it was clear that the connection between etymology and taxonomy was an intellectual concern that Ray returned to time and time again.

Lastly, it seemed that inclusion of the latest scholarship on Francis Willughby was necessary. Oswald and Preston rightly relied on Charles E. Raven's magisterial John Ray, Naturalist: His Life and Works (1942, 1986) for their biographical essay about the naturalist. However, consideration of the biographical chapter in David Cram, Jeffrey L. Forgeng and Dorothy Johnston's edition of Willughby's Book of Games (2003) would have provided a more thorough analysis of Ray's relationship with Willughby and Joshua Child. Child married Willughby's widow Emma and thus controlled Willughby's papers containing his observations of natural history.

Those criticisms aside, John Ray's Cambridge Catalogue is a thorough piece of scholarship that does justice to Ray's first published foray into botanical taxonomy. It will contribute greatly to our understanding of the beginnings of Ray's career as a natural historian, and his contributions to the ‘new science’ of the early modern period.