A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN. 
*53 
destined soon to be overshadowed by the simpler artificial 
grouping of Linnaeus, when altered and amended (as it was by 
himself in 1703), “ unquestionably formed,” as Lindley has said, 
the basis of that Natural System which is universal^ received 
to-day. 
The accidental death of Morison in 1683 turned Ray’s 
attention to an ambitious scheme that he had previously abandon¬ 
ed from unwillingness to seem to compete with the Oxford 
professor, viz., a general history of plants. Such was his industry 
that, in addition to Willughby’s History of Fishes, a folio of 370 
pages, more than half of which was Ray’s work, the year 1686 
saw the issue of the first volume of the Historia Plantanim , 
containing nearly 1,000 pages, the second—of equal bulk — 
following two years later—the whole being completed with¬ 
out even the help of an amanuensis. 
The first volume contains a most remarkable summary of 
all that was then known in vegetable histology and physiology 
under the title “De Plantis in Genere”—“a general account of 
the science in 58 pages,” says Prof. Julius Sachs, “ which, printed 
in ordinary size, would itself make a small volume, and which 
treats of the whole of theoretical botany in the style of a modern 
text-book.” “ We believe,” write Cuvier and Dupetit-Thouars, 
“ that the best monument that could be erected to the memory 
of Ray would be the republication of this part of his work in a 
separate form.” Sir James Smith, the profound admirer of 
Linnaeus, speaks of Ray as “ the most accurate, the most philo¬ 
sophical and the most faithful amongst all the botanists of 
our own, or perhaps any other times ” ; and Sachs, while in¬ 
sisting on Ray’s indebtedness for his precise terminology to 
Joachim Jung (whose manuscript notes Ray acknowledges he 
had seen, probably through the agency of the learned Pole, Samuel 
Hartlib,as early as 1660), adds that Jung’s work was “ enriched 
by Ray’s good morphological remarks.” The completeness 
of Ray’s work may be gauged from the fact that the first two 
volumes of the Historia describes 6,900 species, as against 
3,500 in Bauhin’s History of some 35 years before, and the third 
volume 11,700 species more, a total of over 18,000 species: his 
caution is seen in that he as yet only admitted Grew’s discovery 
of the sexuality of plants as “ probable.” 
To us to-day, it is interesting to note that, in the Preface to 
