i8 ROBERT MORISON AND JOHN RAY 



and proved to be a laborious and costly undertaking. Morison 

 impoverished himself in the preparation even of the one volume 

 of it that appeared in his lifetime, though his many friends 

 provided the cost of the 126 plates of figures with which it is 

 illustrated, and the University advanced considerable sums of 

 money. The work was to have been issued in three parts : the 

 first part was to be devoted to Trees and Shrubs, and the other 

 two parts to the Herbs. The volume published by Morison in 

 1680, and described as Pars Secunda, deals with only five out of 

 the fifteen sections into which he classified herbaceous plants, 

 although it extends to more than 600 folio pages. In the 

 preface he gives as his reason for beginning with the Herbs 

 rather than with the Trees and Shrubs, that he wished to 

 accomplish first the most difficult part of his task lest, in the 

 event of his death before the completion of the Historia, it 

 should fall into the hands of incompetent persons. He did not 

 live to finish his great undertaking. In November, 1683, he was 

 in London on business connected with it : as he was crossing 

 the Strand near Charing Cross, he was knocked down by a 

 coach, and was so severely injured that he died on the following 

 day. He was buried in the church of St Martin-in-the- Fields. 



His unfinished work did not, as he feared, fall into incom- 

 petent hands. It was entrusted by the University to Jacob 

 Bobart the younger, who on the death of his father in 1679, had 

 succeeded him as Keeper of the Physic Garden, and who also 

 succeeded Morison as Horti Praefectus, but not as Professor 

 Botanices\ the Professorship remained in abeyance for nearly 

 forty years. After much difficulty and delay, a second and 

 final instalment of the Historia, the Pars Tertia, dealing with 

 the remaining ten sections of herbaceous plants, was published 

 in 1699, as a folio of 657 pages with 168 plates. The material 

 at Bobart's disposal was fairly abundant, consisting of Morison's 

 MS. of four more of his sections of Herbs, with notes upon the 

 remaining six sections. But even so, the task of completion 

 was a laborious one, for it involved the incorporation of 

 references to the very many descriptions of new plants that 

 had been published since Morison's death: it has been generally 

 admitted that Bobart discharged it with commendable skill. 



