A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN 
J 45 
MISCELLANEOUS . 
Salt (anent Red-hills). —“ For it is gendered of sea water 
by working of the sunne : for some of the sea abideth at cliffes 
and is dried with the sunne, and is sometimes drawn out of salt- 
pits and sodde till water turne into hardnesse of salt, that was 
fleeting before, and so made hard and thicke with heat.”— 
Batman uppon Bartholome, His Booke, De Proprietatibus Rerum 
(1582) Bk. 16, c. 95. 
JOHN RAY, SAMUEL DALE, AND BENJAMIN 
ALLEN: A EULOGY. 
Delivered at the Meeting of the Club at Braintree, 27 th April 1912. 
By Prof. G. S. BOULGER, F.L.S., F.G.S., &c., Vice-President of the Essex Field Club. 
^HE main purpose of our coming together to-day is to 
JL do honour to the memory of three Essex worthies. 
Unlike Mark Antony, we come not to bury them, but to praise 
them. 
1 should be sorry to think, with regard to one at least 
of the three, John Ray, that it may be suggested it is neces¬ 
sary, in so doing, that we should resuscitate a forgotten reputa¬ 
tion. It cannot, I think, be doubted that it is more difficult 
to acquire a lasting reputation in science than it is in art—by 
work, that is, of pure reason, as distinguished from works of 
the imagination. The imaginative genius, whether poet or 
painter, scarcely seems to be the product of a slow process 
of orderly evolution. He seems to burst upon his age like 
Athene fully armed from the head of Zeus ; or shall we sav, 
with Wordsworth, 
\ 
“ Trailing clouds of glory 
“ And by the vision splendid 
“ Is on his way attended . . [from] 
“ That Imperial palace whence he came ” ? 
The man of science, on the other hand, is but the heir of 
preceding ages : he builds on the foundations laid, more or less 
securely, by his forerunners ; or, perhaps, we should rather say, 
he does but pick up a few pretty shells from the shores of the 
great ocean of truth and add them to the frail grotto begun by 
those before him. 
