142 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. PT. in. 



dons very clearly as they form the two halves of the bean 

 when you take off the outer skin ; and secondly, the 

 monocotyledons, or those whose seeds have only one large 

 seed-leaf, like a grain of wheat. The dicotyledons he again 

 divided into those having simple flowers, like the buttercup, 

 and those whose flowers are compound, like the daisy ; for if 

 you pick a daisy to pieces you will find that the centre is 

 made up of a number of little flowers, each of them perfect 

 in itself and having its own green calyx and coloured corolla, 

 and its own stamens and seed-vessel. Even the white strap- 

 like rays round the daisy are each a separate though imperfect 

 flower, therefore every daisy is a branch of little flowerets, or 

 a compound flower. Ray went on next to class the simple 

 flowers according to the number of seeds they bore, and the 

 way in which the seeds were arranged in the seed-vessel. 

 In this way he made a rough but complete classification of 

 all the known plants. Linnaeus, the great botanist of the 

 eighteenth century, adopted many of Ray's divisions, which 

 had meanwhile been made more perfect by Joseph Tourne- 

 fort, a Frenchman, born at Aix, in Provence, in 1656. 



Ray outlived his friend Willughby more than thirty 

 years, and died in 1705 at the age of seventy-seven. His 

 death brings us to the end of the Natural History of the 

 seventeenth century, so far as we have been able to notice 

 it. But I cannot too often insist upon the fact that the men 

 here selected Malpighi, Grew, Ray, and Willughby are 

 merely a few among an immense number of observers in the 

 same line of study. I have picked out those whose work 

 is most easily to be understood, and whose names are well- 

 known ; but I could have selected not four but forty others 

 who ought to have been mentioned, in anything like a com- 

 plete history of the period. We must, however, be content 

 to catch here and there a glimpse of the advance that was 



