Ray's work as a botanist and zoologist was mainly concerned with description and classification; and as such lay outside the area of speculative and controversial science. He found the study of nature in a primitive and inchoate state, and was content to devote himself to the primary business of observing, discriminating, defining and arranging the flora and fauna to which he could get access. The need for such work and the magnitude of his contribution to it are obvious: there could be no scientific biology until it had been undertaken. In perceiving and insisting that specific distinctions must be based not upon size or colour, habitat or habits, but upon structure, Ray vindicated his claim to be something more than a maker of collections and catalogues, and repudiated in advance Linnaeus's criticism of him. If his researches into plant and animal anatomy seldom led him beyond the study of taxonomy into the problems of form and function, still less into those of evolution or genetics, he very effectively laid the foundation for such studies and, as we have seen, pointed the way towards them.