THE NATURAL HISTORY OF JOHN RAY 43 



His chief assistant was Francis Willughby, a young 

 man of wealth and good family ; while Martin Lister, a 

 Cambridge fellow, who had already laboured at natural 

 history with good effect, undertook an independent 

 share in the work. Ray wisely began with what lay 

 close at hand, and published a catalogue of the plants 

 growing around Cambridge. This was not a mere list 

 of species, but a note-book charged with the results of 

 much observation and reading. Journeys in quest of 

 fresh material were begun. Then Ray's well-laid 

 scheme was disconcerted by calamities which would 

 have overwhelmed a less resolute man. He was driven 

 from Cambridge by the Act of Uniformity, and forced to 

 serve for years as a tutor in private families. When 

 this servitude came to an end his only livelihood was a 

 small pension, bequeathed to him by Willughby, on 

 which he lived in rustic solitude. Willughby was cut 

 off at the age of thirty-six, having accumulated much 

 information but completed nothing. Lister became a 

 fashionable physician, to whom natural history was 

 little more than an elegant diversion. The whole 

 burden of the enterprise fell upon Ray, who manfully 

 bore it to the end. He completed his own share of the 

 work, prepared for the press the imperfect manuscripts 

 of Willughby, and before he died was able to fulfil the 

 pledge which he had given forty years before in the 

 prosperity of early manhood. It is needless to say that 

 the natural history of Britain, executed in great part by a 

 poor and isolated student, fell far short of what Ray might 

 at one time have reasonably expected to accomplish. 



Ray, like other early naturalists, saw that a methodi- 

 cal catalogue of species, arranged on some principle 

 which could be accepted in all times and in all countries, 

 was indispensable to the progress of natural history, 



D2 



