106 



MEMORIALS OF RAY : 



The two latter are posthumous, and were published by 

 Derham, who performed towards Ray the same office that 

 the latter had so well fulfilled towards his friend Wil- 

 lughby ; they form an abridgment of the ' Ornithology' 

 and ' Ichthyology' which had appeared under Willughby's 

 name, with important additions, due principally to the 

 collections made by Sloane in Jamaica, and which had 

 been placed at Ray's disposal by that learned physician. 



The " cetacea" are there arranged among fishes, and de- 

 scribed according to the Phalsenography of Sibbald, which 

 had just appeared ; but on this point Ray wrote expressly 

 to Rivinus to explain that he classed them thus only in 

 accordance with common usage. 



4. ' Historia Insectorum,' 1710, in 4to, also posthu- 

 mous, and printed at the expense of the Royal Society, 

 and under the inspection of Derham. To this book Martin 

 Lister added a treatise on the " spiders" and " scarabi" of 

 England, and it is remarkable for the innumerable de- 

 scriptions of insects which it contains, a great part of 

 which also was due to the labours of Willughby. The 

 author rejects the doctrine of spontaneous generation. 



The distinctive character of Ray's works consists in the 

 clearness of his methods, which were not only more rigorous 

 than those of any of his predecessors, but applied with 

 greater uniformity and precision. The divisions which he 

 introduced into the classes of quadrupeds and birds have 

 been followed by English naturalists even to the present 

 day ; and we find evident traces of Ray's arrangement of 

 birds in Linnaeus, Brisson, BufFon, and all authors who 

 have written upon this class of animals. The ' Ornithology' 

 of Salerne is but a translation of the ' Synopsis ;' and 

 BufFon is indebted to Willughby for almost the whole of 

 the anatomical portion of his ' History of Birds.' A trans- 

 lation also of his articles on fish has afforded nearly the 

 whole of the substance of the ' Dictionnaire d'lchthyologie,' 

 byDaubenton andHaiiy,in the ' Encyclopedic Methodique.' 

 These labours, however, in nearly all branches of natural 

 history, vast as they appear to the imagination, did not 



