146 Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 



that a course of perseverance would be pursued until all was accom- 

 plished. 



The healths of Cuvier and Jussieu, and the Naturalists of Europe^ 

 were drunk with much approbation. 



Dr. Buckland's health, and Prosperity to the University of Ox- 

 ford, having been most cordially received ; the learned Professor 

 addressed the meeting as follows : — 



" The President of the Royal Society has already informed you, 

 by a detailed examination of his extensive Works, how great are the 

 advantages which Natural History has derived from the labours and 

 the genius of Ray ; and in the presence of so many illustrious bo- 

 tanists as I now see assembled in this place, it would be highly 

 presumptuous in me to say one word on the benefits, the inestimable 

 benefits, which he has conferred on the science of Botany. My 

 excellent friend and colleague Professor Sedgwick, were he now 

 present(and I regret that severe illness alone has caused his absence), 

 would tell you how extensively the influence of his exertions and 

 his example have operated to excite a taste for natural knowledge 

 in the University of Cambridge, — a taste which he, a member of the 

 same College, and animated with the same spirit, as the immortal 

 Ray, maintains and keeps alive in the present generation with a zeal 

 and talent worthy to follow his great predecessor in the field of Na- 

 tural Science. 



*' As a member of the University of Oxford, I rejoice to bear most 

 ample testimony to the lasting benefits which the exertions of the 

 age and friends of Ray have transmitted to that seat of learning, to 

 which it is my happiness to belong. The labours of Lister, Plot, 

 and Ashmole, of Lloyd, and of Robert Boyle, and the establishment 

 of the Botanic Garden and of the Ashmolean Museum, mark in our 

 University the burst of a kindred flame to that which Ray had excited 

 in the sister University ; and laid in Oxford the foundation of that right 

 method of investigation, and of making collections in Natural Hi- 

 story, which have been transmitted to our own time. In the depart- 

 ment of science to which my own attention is peculiarly directed, the 

 genius of Ray had made advances that would do honour to the pre- 

 sent day. In his Treatise on the Wisdom of God in the Creation, he 

 points out examples of design and utility in the form and structure 

 and composition of our planet, founded on extensive and accurate ob- 

 servation of facts, and illustrated with sound argument, mixed with 

 much good feeling and good sense. And in his Discourses on Chaos, 

 Creation, and Deluge, there is a knowledge of many phaenomena of 

 the earth's surface, the discovery of which the present generation are 

 too apt to consider as exclusively their own : — that important and 

 leading doctrine of the Huttonian theory, which attributes the ele- 

 vation of islands, mountains, and continents to the force of vapour 

 acting from below, is set forth in words that form almost an exact 

 parallel to the statements of the same theory in Playfair's Illustra- 

 tions ; the theory in neither case was nev/ ; it was indeed handed 

 down from high antiquity ; but it is illustrated by Ray, with sucli 

 abundant arguments and examples derived from the effects of 

 earthquakes and volcanoes which in his time raged so terribly in 



Jamaica, 



