James Gray, 14 October 1891 - 14 December 1975

Abstract

James Gray died on 14 December 1975 in his home at King’s Field in Cambridge. It may be difficult today to realize fully the extent to which he has influenced the course of biology, notably in Great Britain, during the first half of this century. When he first appeared on the scene as a student—and his first publication dates back to 1911—comparative morphologists and embryologists were the dominant breed. They were still basking in the glory of the Darwinian era, and were still hammering home, through much detailed evidence, support for the theory of an evolutionary relationship of living organisms, a theory which by then had been, in outline at least, almost universally accepted. The taxonomic order which was being created by fitting each species into the proper pigeon hole of its pedigree was, no doubt, a laudable exercise—if for no better reason than the one given by Mount Everest climbers for their endeavours. To a man of an impatient disposition, like James Gray, it became clear that in view of the very large number of known species many more generations of scientists could be kept occupied as sedate, taxonomic filing clerks by painstaking description and comparison of structures. This sort of existence was not for him; it lacked the excitement of discovery, and was not likely to make the principles or mechanisms underlying the process of evolution any more plausible.