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NOTICE OF RAY. 



John Ray, or Wray, in Latin Raius, an English 

 divine, and one of the most learned and most copious of 

 the naturalists of the seventeenth century, was born at 

 Black Notley, near Braintree, in Essex, on the 29th of 

 November, 1628. He v^^as the son of a blacksmith. 



His education was begun at the school of Braintree, 

 and continued in Cambridge, first at St. Katherine Hall, 

 and afterwards at Trinity College, in which foundation 

 he obtained a fellowship, at the same time with Isaac 

 Barrow, the celebrated mathematician, and instructor of 

 Newton. 



This provision enabhng him to follow the bent of his 

 inclinations, Ray devoted himself with equal ardour to 

 science and literature, and made such progress, that at 

 the age of twenty- three he was chosen tutor in Greek, and 

 soon afterwards in mathematics and the humanities. 



He was distinguished at the same time by the sermons 

 and other discourses which he delivered in the college 

 chapel, and in which, it may be remarked, he carefully 

 avoided the inflated and bombastic style which at that 

 period disfigured pulpit eloquence in England. 



His favourite studies, however, from his earliest years, 

 appears to have been that of the works of Nature, and all 

 his leisure to have been employed in herborizing. He 

 became first known as a botanist in 1660, by the publi- 

 cation of his ' Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam 



