178 PITTONIA. 
neighborhood of Cambridge, England. It is written in Latin, 
and, with its supplementary index of old English names of 
the plants, numbers two hundred and eighty-five pages. The 
author, whose name is modestly withheld, is John Ray, 
Britain’s chief botanical celebrity of the seventeenth century. 
It is the earliest and the least of all the many volumes of 
botany which its learned author gave to the world in his day. 
If I had wished to call attention to the great learning, and the 
considerable botanical merits of Ray, I could not have chosen 
a book of his less fitted to illustrate those points ; for it was 
his first effort in the line of botanical authorship; only a 
small local flora, the genera and species arranged alphabeti- 
cally, and with no attempt at a methodical sequence or group- 
ing in any part; fungi, mosses, ferns and all flowering plants, 
in their respective genera, to be sought, each species under: 
the heading of the initial letter of its generic name. 
But the tyro, trained up in the belief that Linn:sus was a 
kind of re-embodied Adam, raised up to name again the ani- 
mals and plants which God had made, may ask how there 
could be catalogues of plants in John Ray’s time, a hundred 
years before Linnzus? The ready answer, which any well 
read botanist will give, is, that in those days, a more or less 
lengthy phrase designated each species, and was at once the 
name for, and the description of it. That which I believe 
very few of my readers will be prepared for, is, the announce- 
ment that, in this little Cambridge Catalogue, which antedates 
Linneus’ Species Plantarum by ninety-three years, there occur, 
as in common use in Ray’s time, more than fifty binary plant 
names which are familiar to us now, are always presumed 
to be of Linnean origin; and are always credited to Linnzus. 
Upon a careful investigation of the application of these Lin- 
nean binary names in this first edition of Ray’s Catalogus, I 
find as many as forty-eight of them to have been applied by 
Ray and his antecedents to the same species to which Lin- 
neus applied them. The Swedish nomenclator seems, indeed, 
studiously to have adopted the old binary names, in the place 
of framing new ones, wherever he could well do so. 
