The Phi Sigma Society's Biologist Magazine ran an article about John Ray in 2008, which begins: ‘The landscape of twenty first century biology owes an enormous debt to Ray, the seventeenth century natural historian whose life was spent in rationalizing the understanding of the living world’. While applauding this desire to give credit where it is certainly due, I argue here that rationalizing, in the strict sense, is precisely what Ray does not do. The rationalist Henry More recoils from the ‘quaint’, which acts upon a reader's fancy rather than the higher faculty of clear reason. Ray, by contrast, revels in the quaint. A natural historian rather than a philosopher or a laboratory scientist, Ray maintains a receptive stance towards the book of nature, which he seeks chiefly to describe rather than to master. He also revels in quaintness and variety in literal texts: while More asserts the homology of every assertion of ‘all men in their wits’, and Wilkins attempts to reverse the effects of Babel by seeking a universal language, we find Ray travelling around the Cornish countryside collecting ‘English words not generally used’, because ‘they may … afford some diversion to the curious’. Finally, and above all, Ray maintains this same receptive stance towards the book of scripture, beginning his natural theology with a profession of faith rather than a claim to logical or moral certainty.