FOUNDERS OF NATURAL CLASSIFICATION 41 



cotyledons like Arum, Paris, and Convallaria. " It seems 

 almost incredible, but it is a fact," says Vines, "that the 

 lapse of nearly 2000 years that separated Theophrastus 

 from Morison marked no material advance in the 

 science of classification." Morison appears to have 

 been a rather cantankerous person and not over-just 

 in his criticisms both of his predecessors, such as 

 Bauhin and Caesalpino, and of his contemporaries, 

 such as Ray. Perhaps the troublous times he Uved in 

 and the part he played in the Civil War — he was for a 

 period a RoyaHst soldier — may have had something to 

 do with the development of the pugnacious spirit so 

 manifest in some of his writings. 



A much finer character and a far more sympatlietic 

 student of nature was John Ray, the puritan divine, a 

 man who has been described as " the greatest European 

 botanist of the seventeenth century." While Oxford 

 was the chief scene of Morison's labours, it was in the 

 environs of Cambridge that Ray first studied the wild 

 plants he met with in his rambles. From the Fenland 

 he extended his wanderings into the Midlands, North 

 Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, and the southern counties. 

 After severing his connection with Cambridge owing to 

 his finding himself unable to subscribe to the Act of 

 Uniformity, he, along with his friend Willughby, travelled 

 extensively over the Continent, returning after three years 

 to complete his exploration of the homeland. He finally 

 retired to a village in Essex where he spent the remainder 

 of his life, writing up the results of his numerous journey- 

 ings and preparing his Historia plantar um gencralis, 

 described by Linnaeus and Haller as an " opus immensi 

 laboris," and pubHshed in 1686. 



Ray's principles of classification are a curious mixture 

 of the views of Caesalpino and Jung, tinctured throughout 

 with ideas of his own. He staj:i:s oE with -the old division 

 of plants into herbs and trees ; although he agrees with 

 Caesalpino in regarding the fruit as importantin deter- 



