In these days when we all realise the importance of heredity and early environment in determining and in interpreting character, the student or John Ray will deplore more strongly than did any of his biographers our almost total ignorance of his parents and childhood. To Derham or to Dale the fact that he was the son of a village blacksmith had to be stated but should then be forgotten. It was unconventional if not indecent. They knew it; but neither they nor their successors thought it necessary to amplify it. For more than a century the year of his birth, though correctly given in at least one of his books, was wrongly stated as 1628; until 1847 no one had taken the trouble to search the parish register, and even then he was sometimes identified with the wrong John Ray. W.H. Mullens, who discovered that he had been baptised twelve months before the traditional time, did not prosecute his researches further or spend the few hours needed to run through the long vellum pages that form the scanty annals of Black Notley in the first half of the seventeenth century.