22 
MEMOIR OF RAY. 
ciples that he did not hesitate to reject it. He was 
accordingly deprived of his fellowship for non-con- 
formity, along with thirteen others belonging to the 
university of Cambridge. 
Ray’s ardent desire of knowledge, and the plea- 
sure he derived from pursuits so congenial to his 
taste and disposition, led him sooner or later to in- 
vestigate almost every department of Natural His- 
tory. But botany, a subject which has attracted 
so many youthful minds to the study of nature, was 
the object of his earliest predilection, and it like- 
wise continued throughout the greater part of his 
life to engross the largest share of his attention. 
Little had hitherto been done for this science, either 
in Britain or on the Continent. When Ray first 
turned his attention to it, it was nearly in the same 
condition in which Turner had found it about a 
century before. Almost the only works that treated 
of plants were styled “ Herbals,” of which the in- 
dividual just named might well say, that they were 
“ al full of unlearned cacographees, and falsely 
naming of herbs.” Their use in medicine was the 
only consideration that recommended plants to at- 
tention ; and while all the works relating to the sub- 
ject were, to quote from the title-page of one of them, 
“ compyled, composed, and auctorysed by divers 
and many noble Doctours and expert Maysters in 
Medycynes,” the object at which they aimed may 
be gathered from the title of the “ Grete Herball,” 
which professed to give “ parfyt knowledge and un- 
