146 A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN. 
The achievement of the artist, moreover, remains—the 
marble speaking to far distant ages, the fresco painting to be 
.copied and sent to the uttermost ends of the earth when it shall 
have faded from the monastery wall, or the poem, “ monumentum 
sere perennius.” 
But what of the work of the man of science ? It was but a 
foundation hidden by the superstructure, a roughly-polished 
gem to be subsequently re-cut, mere old bricks worn beyond 
recognition by later criticism and built into a structure bearing 
no resemblance to that of which they originally formed a part. 
Who remembers the careful observer, the sound reasoner, or 
the industrious recorder of the early days of science ? In 
literature or art we reverently worship the glories of the past : 
in science we constantly strive to add something new to the 
store of knowledge : the text-book of ten years ago is dangerously 
misleading : we want the latest work of yesterday or, rather, we 
are looking forward to that of to-morrow. 
To the man in the street, to whom the names at least of 
Shakespere and Milton, of Dryden and of Pope, of Reynolds 
and Gainsborough, Hogarth and Constable will be known, I 
fear that the name of John Ray , not to presume to mention those 
of Samuel Dale and Benjamin Allen, may convey little or nothing 
—even in Braintree itself. To-day, however, I would appeal 
from the man in the street to those who take some interest in 
the history of science and in the lives and work of those men in 
the past to whom we are so much indebted for the present 
position of our knowledge. 
The seventeenth century saw a renaissance of pure science 
based upon observation and experiment. However much truth 
there may be in the flippant comment that the Lord Chancellor 
Francis Bacon wrote about science like—a Lord Chancellor, 
we have the express testimony of the founders of the Royal 
Society that their business was to consider things pertaining 
to what had been called his “ New Philosophy.” The student of 
plants and animals was no longer primarily concerned, as he 
had been in the 15th century, with the opinions of Aristotle, 
Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and other ancient writers, as to the 
identity, structure and physiology of the organisms in question : 
he was not now to give his chief attention to the medicinal 
uses of the plants he studied, as had, almost without exception 
