Guide to an Exhibition of 
History of Staffordshire in 1686, and he had projected histories 
of Middlesex and Kent. These were the forerunners of a 
numerous series of county natural histories by different authors. 
Plot’s volumes contained original observations and the first 
record of some English Plants. 
Childrey’s work may also have prompted the production 
of Sir Robert Sibbald’s [1641-1722] similar work, Scotia 
Illustrata^ that appeared in 1684. 
S ystematic Zoology and Botany were next most con¬ 
siderably advanced by the labours of John Ray, or, as he 
wrote it before 1669, Wray [1627-1705], and his friend and 
co-worker Francis Willughby [1635-1672]. These two 
naturalists, dissatisfied with the status of Natural History, agreed 
to attempt a systematic description of the whole organic world, 
Willughby undertaking the Animals and Ray the Plants. 
No. 46. Ray’s Catalogus Plantarum AngUce^ etc.^ London, 1670, was 
the first outcome of the travels the two friends had made in 
company : it enumerated only some 1,050 species, great care 
having been exercised to exclude varieties. In both this and 
the second edition, which appeared in 1677, the Plants were 
arranged in alphabetical order. 
The early death of Willughby left the whole of the projected 
undertaking to Ray. He first edited and brought out 
No. 50. Willughby’s Ornithologia in 1676, an English translation 
following in 1678, and the Historia Piscium in 1686. Ray’s 
No. 48. first systematic work on Plants, the Methodus Plantarum nova^ 
was produced in 1682, and revised in 1703 ; in this he fore¬ 
shadowed the Natural System. 
No. 49. Ray’s greatest botanical work, the Historia Plantarum^ 
the preparation of which had remained in abeyance so long as 
Robert Morison was engaged on a similar undertaking, was 
resumed on the latter’s death, and came out in 1686-88 : it 
contained descriptions of some 6,900 plants. In 1690 his 
catalogue of British Plants re-arranged systematically was 
No. 47. published under the title of Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britan- 
nicarum^ and gave accounts of some 250 more species than were 
cited in the Catalogus. 
To Ray is due both the more accurate definition of 
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