AS A NATURALIST 
vocabulary; his style in the notes is concise, and occasionally 
in the description of an animal or a plant there are striking 
felicity and vigour in his expression. Gray's handwriting is ex- 
quisite ; it is small and fine but always distinct, with ten to twelve 
words in an average line, with few erasures or insertions, and 
scarcely ever with a blot. A facsimile of one of the printed pages 
and of its opposite interleaved page will serve better than any 
description to give a correct image of his work. 
In his descriptions of animals Linnaeus frequently gives be- 
side the Latin name its synonym in various languages, but on 
the margins of the text Gray adds greatly to the number of the 
synonyms, often citing from remote and little known tongues. 
Thus names occur from the following languages : English, Welsh, 
Erse, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, 
Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Ancient and Mod- 
ern Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Mexican, Brazilian, Peru- 
vian, and these are far from exhausting the list. 
The citations from works on Natural History, books of Travel, 
Transactions of learned Societies, which abound in his notes, 
and the still more numerous references to them, show the wide 
range of Gray's reading. The list of books quoted or referred to 
runs up to not far from one hundred distinct titles, many of 
them of works in numerous volumes. Beside general works on 
Natural History, and the Transactions of learned Societies they 
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