RAY. The Rays (Batoidei) together with the Sharks (Selackoidei) form the suborder Plagiostomata of Cartila-ginous fishes, and are divided into six families, as already noticed in ICHTHYOLOGY, vol. xii. pp. 685, 686.
The first family contains only the Saw-fishes (Pristis), of which five species are known, from tropical and subtropical seas. Although saw-fishes possess all the essential characteristics of the rays proper, they retain the elongate form of the body of sharks, the tail bein


excessively muscular am: "saw" (fig. 1) is a flat and enormously devel-oped prolongation of the snout, with an endo-skeleton which consists of from three to five carti-laginous tubes; these are, in fact, merely the rostral processes of the cranial cartilage and are found in all rays, though they are commonly much shorter. The integument of the saw is hard, covered with shagreen; and a series of strong teeth, sharp in front, and flat behind, are embedded in it, in alveolar sockets, on each side. The saw is a most formidable weapon of offence, by means of which the fish tears pieces of flesh off the body of its victim, or rips open its abdomen to feed on the organ of locomotion. The protruding intestines. The teeth proper, with which the mouth is armed, are ex-tremely small and obtuse, * and unsuitable for inflicting => wounds or seizing animals. *_ Saw-fishes are abundant in =* the tropics; in their stomach & pieces of intestines and frag-^ ments of cuttle-fish have =* been found. They grow to SB' a large size, specimens with ==o saws 6 feet long and 1 foot 5=c broad at the base being of
common occurrence. ^ The rays of the second CZ, family,


The third family, Torpedinidse, includes the Electric Eays. The peculiar organ (fig. 2) by which the electricity is produced has been described in vol. xii. p. 650. The fish uses this power voluntarily either to defend itself or to stun or kill the smaller animals on which it feeds. To receive the shock the object must complete the galvanic circuit by communicating with the fish at two distinct points, either directly or through the medium of some conducting body. The electric currents created in these fishes exercise all the other known powers of electricity : they render the needle mag-netic, decompose chemical -ompounds, and emit the spark. The dorsal surface of the electric organ is positive, the ventral negative. Shocks accidentally given to persons are severely felt, and, if pro-ceeding from a large healthy fish, will temporarily paralyse the arms of a strong man. The species of the genus Torpedo, six or seven in number, are distributed over the coasts of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, and two reach northwards to the coasts of Great Britain (T. marmorata and T. hebetans). They are said to attain to a weight of from 80 to 100 lb, but fortunately such gigantic specimens are scarce, and prefer sandy ground at some distance from the shore, where they are not disturbed by the violent agita-

tion of the surface-water. Other smaller size, inhabit different


seas. All the rays of this family have, like electric fishes generally, a smooth and naked body.
The fourth family, Raiidm, comprises the Skates and Rays proper, or Raia. More than thirty species are known, chiefly from the temperate seas of both hemispheres, but much more numerously from the northern than the southern. A few species descend to a depth of nearly 600 fathoms, without, however, essentially differing from their surface congeners. Rays, as is sufficiently indicated by the shape of their body, are bottom-fishes, living on flat sandy ground, generally at no great distance from the coast or the surface. They lead a sedentary life, progressing, like the flat-fishes, by an undulatory motion of the greatly extended pectoral fins, the thin slender tail having entirely lost the function of an organ of locomo-tion, and acting merely as a rudder. They are carnivorous and feed exclusively on molluscs, crustaceans, and fishes. Some of the species possess a much larger and more pointed snout than the others, and are popularly distinguished as "skates." The follow-ing are known as inhabitants of the British seas :—(a) Short-snouted species: (1) the Thornback (R. elavata), (2) the Homelyn Ray (R. maeulata), (3) the Starry Ray (R. radiata), (4) the Sandy Ray [R. circidaris); (b) Long-snouted species, or Skates: (5) the Common Skate (R. batis), (6) the Flapper Skate (R. macrorhynchus), (7) the Burton Skate {R. marginatum), (8) and (9) the Shagreen Skates (R. vomer and R. fnllonica). A deep-sea species (R. hyper-borea) has recently been discovered near the Faroe Islands at 600 fathoms. Most of the skates and rays are eaten, except during the breeding season ; and even the young of the former are esteemed as food. The skates attain to a much larger size than the rays, viz., to a width of 6 feet and a weight of 400 and 500 lb.
The members of the fifth family, Trygonidee or Sting-rays, are distinguished from the rays proper by having the vertical fins replaced by a strong spine attached to the upper side of the tail. Some forty species are known, which inhabit tropical more than temperate seas. The spine is barbed on the sides and is a most effective weapon of defence ; by lashing the tail in every direction the sting-rays can inflict dangerous or at least extremely painful wounds. The danger arises from the lacerated nature of the wound as well as from the poisonous property of the mucus inoculated. Generally only one or two spines are developed. Sting-rays attain to about the same size as the skates and are eaten on the coasts of the Mediterranean and elsewhere. One species (Trygon pastinaca) is not rarely found in the North Atlantic and extends northwards to the coasts of Ireland, England, and Norway.


The rays of the sixth and last family, Myliobatidse, are popularly known under various names, such as "Devil-fishes," "Sea-devils," and '' Eagle-rays." In them the dilatation of the body, or rather the development of the pectoral fins, is carried to an extreme, whilst the tail is very thin and sometimes long like a whip-cord (fig. 3). Caudal spines are generally present and similar to those

EIG. 3.—Aetobatis narinari (Indo-Paeific Ocean).
of the sting-rays ; but in the pectoral fin a portion is detached and forms a " cephalic " lobe or pair of lobes in front of the snout. The dentition consists of perfectly flat molars, adapted for crushing hard substances. In some of the eagle-rays the molars are large and tessellated (fig. 4), in others extremely small. Of the twenty

FIG. 4.—Jaws of an Eagle-Ray, Myliobatis aquila.
species which are known, from tropical and temperate seas, the majority attain to a very large and some to an enormous size : one mentioned by Risso, which was taken at Messina, weighed 1250 lb. A foetus taken from the uterus of the mother (all eagle-rays are viviparous), captured at Jamaica and preserved in the British Museum, is 5 feet broad and weighed 20 lb. The mother measured 15 feet in width and as many in length, and was between 3 and 4 feet thick. At Jamaica, where these rays are well known under the name of " devil-fishes," they are frequently attacked for sport's sake, but their capture is uncertain and sometimes attended with danger. The eagle-ray of the Mediterranean (Myliobatis aquila) has strayed as far northwards as the south coast of England. (A. 0. G.)
RAY or WEAY (as he wrote his name till 1670), JOHN (1628-1705), sometimes called the father of English natural history, was the son of the blacksmith of Black Notley near Braintree in Essex. There he was born on 29th November 1628, or, according to other authorities, some months earlier. From Braintree school he was sent at the age of sixteen to Catherine Hall, Cambridge, whence he removed to Trinity College after about one year and three-quarters. His tutor at Trinity was Dr Duport, regius pro-fessor of Greek, and his intimate friend and fellow-pupil the celebrated Isaac Barrow. Bay was chosen minor fellow of Trinity in 1649, and in due course became a major fellow on proceeding to the master's degree. He held many college offices, becoming successively lecturer in Greek (1651), mathematics (1653), and humanity (1655), praelec-tor (1657), junior dean (1657), and college steward (1659 and 1660) ; and according to the habit of the time he was accustomed to preach in his college chapel and also at Great St Mary's before the university, long before he took holy orders. Among his sermons preached before his ordination, which was not till 23d December 1660, were the famous discourses on The Wisdom of God in the Crea-tion, and on the Chaos, Deluge, and Dissolution of the World. Ray's reputation was high also as a tutor; he communicated his own passion for natural history to several pupils, of whom Francis Willughby is by far the most famous.
Ray's quiet college life came to an abrupt close when he found himself unable to subscribe to the Act of Uni-formity of 1661, and was accordingly obliged to give up his fellowship in 1662, the year after Isaac Newton had entered the college. We are told by Dr Derham in his Life of Ray that the reason of his refusal " was not (as some have imagined) his having taken the ' Solemn League and Covenant,' for that he never did, and often declared that he ever thought it an unlawful oath; but he said he could not declare for those that had taken the oath that no obligation lay upon them, but feared there might." From this time onwards he seems to have depended chiefly on the bounty of his pupil Willughby, who made Ray his constant companion while he lived, and at his death left him £60 a year, with the charge of educating his two sons.
In the spring of 1663 Ray started together with Willughby and two other of his pupils on a Continental tour, from which he returned in March 1666, parting from Willughby at Montpellier, whence the latter con-tinued his journey into Spain. He had previously in three different journeys (1658, 1661, 1662) travelled through the greater part of Great Britain, and selections from his private notes of these journeys were edited by George Scott in 1760, under the title of Mr Hay's Itineraries. Bay himself published an account of his foreign travel in 1673, entitled Observations topographical, moral, and physiological, made on a Journey through part of the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, and France. From this tour Bay and Willughby returned laden with collections, on which they meant to base complete systematic descriptions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Willughby under-took the former part, but, dying in 1672, left only an ornithology and ichthyology, in themselves vast, for Bay to edit; while the latter used the botanical collections for the groundwork of his Methodus plantarum nova (1682), and his great Historia generalis plantarum (1685). The plants gathered on his British tours had already been described in his Catalogus plantarum Anglise (1670), which work is the basis of all later English floras.
In 1667 Bay was elected a fellow of the Boyal Society, and in 1669 he published in conjunction with Willughby his first paper in the Philosophical Transactions on " Ex-periments concerning the Motion of Sap in Trees." They demonstrated the ascent of the sap through the wood of the tree, and supposed the sap to " precipitate a kind of white coagulum or jelly, which may be well conceived to be the part which every year between bark and tree turns to wood, and of which the leaves and fruits are made." Immediately after his admission into the Boyal Society he was induced by Bishop Wilkins to translate his Peal Character into Latin, and it seems he actually completed a translation, which, however, remained in manuscript; his Methodus plantarum nova was in fact undertaken as a part of Wilkins's great classificatory scheme.
In 1673 Bay married Margaret Oakley of Launton I (Oxford); in 1676 he went to Sutton Coldfield, and in 1677


to Falborne Hall in Essex. Finally, in 1679, lie removed to Black Notley, where he afterwards remained. His life there was quiet and uneventful, but embittered by bodily weakness and chronic sores. He occupied himself in writ-ing books and in keeping up a very wide scientific corre-spondence, and lived, in spite of his infirmities, to the age of seventy-six, dying on 17th January 1705.
Ray's first book, the Catalogas plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nasccnlium (1660, followed by appendices in 1663 and 1685), was written in conjunction with his " amicissimus et individuus comes," John Nid. The plants, 626 in number, are enumerated alphabetic-ally, but a system of classification differing little from Caspar Bauhin's is sketched at the end of the book ; and the notes contain many curious references to other parts of natural history. The stations of the plants are minutely described ; and Cambridge students still gather some of their rarer plants in the copses or chalk-pits where he found them. The book shows signs of his indebtedness to Joachim Jung of Hamburg, who had died in 1657 leaving his writings unpublished ; but a MS. copy of some of them was sent to Ray by Hartlieb in 1660. Jung invented or gave precision to many technical terms that Ray and others at once made use of in their descriptions, and that are now classical; and his notions of what constitutes a specific distinction and what characters are valueless as such seem to have been adopted with little change by Ray. The first two editions of the Catalogas plantarum Anglim (1670, 1677) were likewise arranged alphabetic-ally ; but in the Synopsis stirpiuvi Britannicarum (1690, 1696, also re-edited by Dillenius 1724, and by Hill 1760) Ray applied the scheme of classification which he had by that time elaborated in the Methodus and the Historia plantarum. The Methodus plan-tarum nova (1682) was largely based on the works of Cffisalpini and Jung, and still more on that of Morison of Oxford. The greatest merit of this book is the use of the number of cotyledons as a basis of classification ; though it must bo remembered that the difference between the monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous embryo was detected by Grew. After dividing plants into flowerless and flowering, Ray says, " Floríferas dividemus in Dicotyledones, quarum semina sata binis foliis anomalis, seminalibus dictis, qua3 cotyledonorum usum pnestant, e terra exeunt, vel in binos saltern lobos dividuntur, quamvis cos supra terrain foliorum specie non efferunt; et Monocotyledones, qua; nee folia bina seminalia efferunt nec lobos binos condunt. ____ divisio ad arbores ctiam extendi potest; siquidem Palmee et congéneres hoc respectu eodem modo a reliquis arboribus differunt quo Monocotyledones a reliquia herbis." But a serious blemish was his persistent separation of trees from herbs, a distinction whose falsity had been exposed by Jung and others, but to which Ray tried to give scientific founda-tion by denying the existence of buds in the latter. At this time he based his classification, like Caisalpini, chiefly upon the fruit, and he distinguished several natural groups, such as the grasses, Labiatm, Umbcllifene, and Papilionacese. The classification of the Methodus was extended and improved in the Historia plantarum, but was disfigured by a large class of Anomalse, to include forms that the other orders did not easily admit, and by the separation of the cereals from other grasses. The first volume of this vast book was published in 1685, the second in the next year, and the third in 1704 ; it enumerates and describes all the plants known to the author or described by his predecessors, to the number, according to Adanson, of 18,625 species. In the first volume a chapter "De plantis in genero" contains an account of all the anatomical and physiological knowledge of the time regarding plants, with the recent speculations and discoveries of Ciesalpini, Grow, Malpighi, and Jung. And Cuvier and Dupetit Thouars, declaring that it was this chapter which gave acceptance and authority to these authors' works, say that "the best monument that could be erected to the memory of Ray would be the republica-tion of this part of his work separately." The Stirpium _______-arum extra Britannias nascentium Sylloge (1694) is a much amplified edition of the catalogue of plants collected on his own Continental tour. In the preface to this book he first clearly admitted the doctrine of the sexuality of plants, which, however, he had no share in establishing. Here also begins his long controversy with Rivinus, which chiefly turned upon Ray's indefensible separation of ligneous from herbaceous plants, and also upon what he con-ceived to be the misleading reliance that Rivinus placed on the characters of the corolla. But in the second edition of his Methodus (1703) he followed Rivinus and Tournefort in taking the flower instead of the fruit as his basis of classification : he was no longer a fructicist but a corollist.
Besides editing his friend Willughoy's books, Ray wrote several zoological works of his own, including Synopses of Quadrupeds (1693), that is to say, both mammals and reptiles, of Birds, and of Fishes (1713) ; the last two were published posthumously, as was also the more important Historia Insectorum (1710). The History of Insects embodied a great mass of Willughby's notes, and the
Synopses of Birds and Fishes were mere abridgments of the " Orni-thology" and "Ichthyology."
Most of Ray's minor works were the outcome of his faculty for laborious compiling and cataloguing; for instance, his Collection of English Proverbs (1670), his Collection of out-of-the-way English Words (1674), his Collection of Curious Travels and Voyages (1693), and his Dictionariolum trilingüe, or Nomenclátor classicus (1675). The last was written for the use of Willughby's sons, his pupils ; it passed through many editions, and is still useful for its careful identifications of plants and animals mentioned by Greek and Latin writers. But Ray's permanent influence and reputation hive probably depended most of all upon his two books entitled The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Crea-tion (1691), and Miscellaneous Discourses concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World (1692). The latter includes three essays, on "The Primitive Chaos and Creation of the World," "The General Deluge, its Causes and Effects," and "The Dissolu-tion of the World and Future Conflagrations." The germ of these works was contained in sermons preached long before in Cambridge. Both books obtained immediate popularity ; the former, at least, was translated into several languages ; and to this day their influ-ence is apparent. For, as Sir J. Smith says in his biography of Ray, "this book [The Wisdom of God, &c] is the basis of all the labours of following divines, who have made the book of nature a commentary on the Book of Revelation." In it Ray recites in-numerable examples of the perfection of organic mechanism, the multitude and variety of living creatures, the minuteness and usefulness of their parts. Many, if not most, of the familiar proofs of purposive adaptation and design in nature were suggested by Ray. The structure of the eye, the hollowness of the bones, the camel's stomach, the hedgehog's armour, are among the thou-sand instances cited by him of immediate creative interpositions. But, though his application of natural history to apologetic theo-logy has made his reputation peculiarly wide, it must be acknow-ledged that none of his scientific discoveries at all equal in value those of the physiological botanists who immediately preceded him, and that even in elassificatory insight ho was surpassed by several of his contemporaries.
Authorities.—Select Remains, Itineraries, and Life, by Dr Derham, edited by
George Scott, 1740; notice by Sir J. E. Smith in Ilee's Cydopeedia; notice by
Cuvier and A. Dupetit Thouars in the Biographic Vniverselle; all these were
collected under the title Memorials of Ray, and edited (with the addition of a
complete catalogue of his works) by Dr Edwin Lankester, 8vo (Ray Society),
1S40 ; Correspondence (with Willughby, Martin Lister, Dr Robinson, Petiver,
Derham, Sir Hans Sloane, and others), edited by Dr Derham, 1718 ; Selections,
with additions, edited by Lankester Ray Society), 1S4S. For accounts of Ray's
system of classification, see Cuvier, Lecons Hist. s. Sci. Nat., p. 48.3; Sprengel,
Gesch. d. Botanik, ii. p. 40 ; also Whewell, Hist. Ind. Sci., iii. p. 332 (ed. 1847),
and Wood, art. "Classification" in Roe's Cyclopedia. (D. W. T.)