A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN. I5I 
germ of all that subsequent systematic work upon which his 
fame mainly depends. Well-known as a writer of pure Latin, 
Ray was persuaded by Wilkins to translate this essay into 
Latin ; but his translation has never been published, and is 
apparently lost. 
On returning to London after a second tour into Cornwall, 
with Willughby, in the summer of 1667, Ray was persuaded to 
join the Royal Society, and it was for its Philosophical Trans¬ 
actions that, a year later, they began a lengthy series of valuable 
experiments on the motion of sap in trees. Willughby’s marriage 
made no difference in the friendly collaboration of the two 
naturalists, save that Ray made two more summer journeys 
into the north by himself, or accompanied only by Thomas 
Willisel, an old Cromwellian soldier, who acted as assistant- 
collector to several of the botanists of the time. When, however, 
in 1672, Willughby died at 37, he left to his own old tutor the 
education of his young children and an annuity of £60, which 
constituted Ray’s main income for the remainder of his life ; 
while the completion of the works upon which they had been 
jointly engaged was made by Ray one of the main purposes of 
his labours. In 1670, he had published his alphabetical catalogue 
of English flowering plants, the first draft, so to speak, of his 
Synopsis, and his Collection of Proverbs, which the modern study 
of folk-lore has kept alive as a book still of interest to-day. 
After this, we read of no more journeys. An offer of £200 a year 
to accompany three young noblemen on the Continent has to be 
declined on the score of health ; and a prodigious literary and 
scientific output fully accounts for the last thirty years of his 
life. Marrying in 1673, at 46, a young woman of 20, Margaret 
Oakeley, who seems to have been a nursery governess at Middle- 
ton, Ray published in that year the account of his foreign tour, 
with a catalogue of the plants of the countries visited, and in 
the following year a Collection of English Words not generally 
used (which is, in fact, a dialect dictionary), with lists of English 
birds and fishes and an account of English methods of mining 
and smelting metals. In 1673, he thought it opportune to pre¬ 
pare for his verv-juvenile pupils a little tri-lingual dictionary or 
vocabulary of English, Latin, and Greek, which proved so useful 
that it went through five editions ; and, by 1676, he had completed 
and published his friend’s Ornithologia. This work was, says 
