John Ray is undoubtedly the star character in the story of Middleton. He was the first great English Natural Scientist and
he belongs to Middleton, arguably more than anywhere else, because the son of a blacksmith would not have been able to have
a lifelong career as a scientist were it not for the encouragement, friendship and financial support of his student Francis
Willughby. Patronage of artists was not uncommon at that time; of scientists it was barely, if at all, known.
The authoritative biography of John Ray is the massively researched, scholarly tome by C.E. Raven, John Ray -
naturalist, published in 1942. Brief biographies are found in several places on the Internet: Wikipedia has one, recently improved from the previous version taken from the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica. See the section on Opinions to find the independent experts' views on Ray's work.
An authoritative review from a respectable botanical source is available here as an Acrobat file. Googling for John Ray yields a good account of his work and its importance.
One of the most succinct and fairest of the many biographical accounts of Ray's life and works is to be found in Chapter 24 of Anna Pavord's The Naming of Names. Other biographies can be found in the section on the societies named for Ray.
Also see the writings of Eric Voegelin, where this noted philosopher traces the evolution of the ideas about species. He first discusses Linnaeus' position, then shows that Linnaeus' predecessor John Ray had a more profound understanding of the issues, going on to show that the later work of Kant had been anticipated by Ray.