614 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO I67O. 



The ingenious and industrious author of this book, having some years ago 

 published a catalogue of the plants growing about Cambridge, has now obliged 

 his country, by presenting it with a catalogue of the plants of all England, and 

 of the isles adjacent. In the doing of which, he has spared neither pains nor 

 cost, travelling himself through all the considerable parts of this k-ingdom, and 

 so viewing and gathering himself almost all the plants here described, some few 

 excepted, which he says he has either taken out of the best authors, or received 

 from very creditable and skilful friends. Neither has he been contented to 

 search and gather them himself, but also diligently compared them with their 

 histories and figures found by botanists; describing those which seemed to 

 have been omitted by others, and adding, with their characteristic notes, those 

 that had been confusedly and carelessly delivered before. 



The reader will find in his catalogue, besides the most necessary synonyma 

 of the plants here enumerated, a summary description also of their principal 

 virtues ; intermixed with many new observations and experiments, medical and 

 physiological. 



Extract of a Letter, written hy M. Hevelius, from DantzicJc, July 5, 

 I67O; Containing chiefly a late Observation of the Variation of the 

 Magnetic Needle ; with an Account of some other Curiosities in those 

 Parts. N' 64, p. 2059- 



In the year l642 I observed the declination of the magnet here, as about the 

 same time at Konigsberg did M. Linnemann, the then professor of mathe- 

 matics there, and we both found the magnetic needle at that time to decline 

 from the north 3° 5' westward. But now (Anno 1670) it is far otherwise ; for 

 it declines at present, as I have very carefully observed, 7° 20' to the same 

 quarter; so that in the space of twenty-eight years that declination is increased 



so well known that it is almost needless to particularize tliem : one of the most esteemed is that 

 entitled. The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation. His great work is the His~ 

 toria Plantarum, which is partly a compilation from Bauhin, &c. intermixed with his own obser- 

 vations and discoveries, and arranged according to his own system. This, it must be confessed^ is 

 complex and intricate, and it has been asserted, that, however beautiful in the idea, neither the 

 plan nor the execution is in any degree calculated to facilitate the knowledge of plants. It seems to 

 have been Ray's great object, as of Morison, to collect together as many natural classes as possible, 

 and these being separately investigated, a multiplicity of character and stops was necessarily required 

 to connect them : hence the intricacy before complained ofj but, as an attempt to investigate the 

 order of nature, it is highly worthy of commendation. Mr. Ray, after having passed a long life, in 

 the uniform exercise of piety, and the pursuit of science, died in the year 1704, in the 75th year 

 of his age. 



