baker: fathers of Yorkshire botany. 191 



soon follows a notice of Hook's ' Micrographia, or the physio- 

 logical description of minute bodies made by magnifying- 

 glasses,' the book in which the microscope was first applied 

 to the study of the vegetable cell. ' Harvey's Treatise on the 

 Circulation of the Blood' had been published in 1628. 

 Newton's ' Principia ' and his discovery of universal gravita- 

 tion was half-a-century later, in 1686. 



During the last fifty years of the seventeenth century, all 

 through the reigns of Charles II, James II, and William and 

 Mary, the progress of botany is closely connected with the 

 name of John Ray ; and it is to him more than to any one else 

 that we are indebted for its establishment as a regular depart- 

 ment of science. Ray was the son of an Essex blacksmith, and 

 was born in 1628. At the age of sixteen he was sent to Cam- 

 bridge, where he made such excellent progress and was esteemed 

 so highly that in 1651 he was appointed lecturer in Greek in 

 Trinity College, in 1654 lecturer in mathematics, in 1658 junior 

 dean, and in 1659 college steward. His attention was first 

 drawn to natural history as a recreation in the intervals of his 

 severer studies. At this time Oxford already possessed a 

 botanic garden, but at Cambridge natural history had been 

 entirely neglected. In 1660 he published his first botanical 

 book — a catalogue of the wild plants of the neighbourhood of 

 Cambridge, in which upwards of 600 kinds are enumerated. 

 It met with a favourable reception amongst the younger 

 collegians and led to his acquaintance with his principal friend 

 and associate Francis Willoughby, the son of a gentleman of 

 considerable fortune, whose estates were in Warwickshire. In 

 1 66 1 they undertook together what was then considered a long 

 journey of exploration, passing through Yorkshire as far north 

 as Glasgow and StirUng, and back again to Cambridge through 

 Westmoreland. Ray attended specially to plants and Willoughby 

 to birds and fishes. A full account of what they saw is printed 

 in Ray's ' Itineraries,' the portion devoted to Yorkshire filling 

 nearly forty pages. Ray had been ordained as a clergyman, 

 but when the Act of Uniformity came into operation in 1662 



