John Ray is often called the Father of British Botany but the Wisdom of God is not about his experimental work or his work to bring order to the plant names of the time, which in books like Historia Plantarum (in Latin) influenced Linnaeus. Rather, it ‘seeks to manifest and display the riches of the power and wisdom of God’ and to refute the growing ideas of the Atheists. To do this he provides examples from astronomy, geology and the living world citing the complexity of plant form and the life history of animals, their structure and function and their adaptation to their environment. The breadth of his examples provide an insight into the state of the science of the natural world at the end of the C17 when the book was written and when the invention of the microscope was opening up a new vista of understanding. It shows how the debate between science and theology was developing. About 100 years later the Suffolk naturalist, the Rev.William Kirby, was studying solitary bees in the rectory garden at Barham near Ipswich which he described in Monographia apum. He also wrote, with William Spence, a four volume book on insects, one of the most successful natural history books of the time, and which Charles Darwin took with him on the voyage of the Beagle.

As a practising clergyman he obviously felt a great conflict between the growing ideas about evolution and the Creation which he sought to resolve in On the power, wisdom, and goodness of God: as manifested in the creation of animals, and in their history, habits, and instincts. Reading this book one can almost feel the turmoil as he sought to explain how the flood or newly discovered marsupials in Australia fitted into the grand design of things.

[These three hundred years, beginning around the time of John Ray and continuing into C21 with Richard Dawkins and others are elegantly and interestingly chronicled by J. Secord in one of the most insightful and gripping books that I have read].

The wisdom of God manifested in the works of the creation is an important work for any one interested in the history of science or religion, now available in facsimile form at a reasonable price.

References

Kirby, W. & Spence, W. (1815). An introduction to entomology: or, elements of the natural history of insects. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, London (Several editions)

Kirby, W. (1835). On the power, wisdom, and goodness of God: as manifested in the creation of animals, and in their history, habits, and instincts. Bridgewater treatises on the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation. Henry G. Bohn, London

Kirby, W. (1802). Monographia apum Angliæ. Printed for the author by J. Raw, Ipswich.

Secord, J. A. (2000). Victorian sensation: the extraordinary publication, reception, and secret authorship of Vestiges of the natural history of creation.University of Chicago Press, Chicago; London