114 RAY AND SOME OF HIS FELLOW- WORKERS 



tions of a real History of Insects had been laid by 

 Swammerdam {infra, p. 181). The classification adopted 

 by Eay may be passed by without remark ; the ancients 

 and Swammerdam furnish all that is of value. I find 

 no original passages which call for extraction, only at 

 long intervals such curiosities of natural history as 

 Pappus' remarks on the advantage for storing of th( 

 hexagonal cells of the honeycomb, Mentzel's account oi 

 the vinegar-fly (Drosophila), Derham's notices of gnats,] 

 blood-worms and the Corethra-larva, which he calls aaj 

 " animated shadow." 



Some of Willughby's papers in the Philosophicall 

 Transactions are of interest, such as his account oi 

 ichneumons/ and of the leaf cutting bee (" bees bred itf 

 cartridges ").^ 



THE CATALOGUE OF CAMBKIDGE PLANTS 



In his preface Eay speaks of the ill-health which had 

 obliged him to spend some of his time in riding or 

 walking, and had thus favoured his open-air studies. 

 The riding (alas !) became impossible in later years, but 

 Ray continued to be an ardent field-naturalist, until he 

 could walk no more. When he began to pay attention 

 to plants, no one in the university had a passable know- 

 ledge of botany, and even the smatterers were few. He 

 seems to have thought that botany had actually declined,! 

 for he speaks of it as "extinctum psene et intermortuum."] 



Ray adopted the nomenclature of J. and C. Bauhin, 

 and of the English herbalists Gerard and Parkinson, 

 simply because their books were so well known. John 

 Bauhin's History he cannot praise too highly, and Caspar 

 Bauhin's Pinax was of great use to him ; Gerard and 

 Parkinson he thought little of 



1 Phil. Trans. No. 76 (1670). "^Ibid. Nos. 65, 74. Cf. Lister, ihid. No. 160. 



