MEMOIR OF RAY. 
65 
Tumulum hunc 
a nonnullis humanitati, et sciential 
naturali, faventibus, 
olim conditum, 
et aliorum bona diligentia 
postea restauratum, 1737, 
nunc e vetustatis situ et sordibus 
pauci de novo revocarunt, 1792. 
otvfyuv etf/ipavuv vrcuta yri rcttpog. 
The era in which Ray flourished, is justly de- 
scribed by Linnaeus as the dawn of the golden age 
in natural history. In the period that preceded it, 
the thick darkness that settled, during the middle 
ages, on almost every subject worthy to occupy the 
human faculties, still continued to overshadow the 
history of nature. Scarcely any effort was made 
ro elucidate even the most familiar phenomena ; 
and when such was attempted, the want of obser- 
vation and philosophical discernment was supplied 
by fictions of the imagination and the extrava- 
gancies of credulity. Since what had been seen 
and ascertained was therefore trifling in amount 
compared with what had been. heard and conjec- 
tured, it is not surprising that the few works of the 
time devoted to natural history, should so abound 
in absurd notions and fictitious representations of 
animal forms, as to be useful for nothing but point- 
ing out the illusions to which mankind have been 
subject. The investigations of Ray and his co- 
E 
