*54 
A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN. 
the first volume of the Historia Plantarum in 1686, Ray first 
mentions the help he had received from Samuel Dale, then only 
27, whom he describes as “ physician and apothecary, our friend 
and neighbour, living in Braintree, who has carefully examined 
the synonymy, corrected errors and supplied omissions. In 
the preface to his Pharmacologia, first published in 1693, Dale 
expressly states—what Pulteney only infers—that he owed 
his initiation into botany to Ray ; and we can certainly say 
that, though 30 years Ray’s junior, he was to stand for the 
remaining 20 years of Ray’s life in much the same position 
that Willughby had occupied before. 
In 1690, although some years before he uncomplainingly 
records that feeble health, accompanied by distressing ulcers 
in his legs, confined him to his house and its immediate sur¬ 
roundings, Ray made use of the classification, then made known 
by his Historia, to recast his alphabetical Catalogus Plantarum 
Anglia into a systematic form. The result was that Synopsis 
Methodica Stirpium Britannicarum, the first systematic British 
Flora, which, with its two later editions of 1696 and 1724, was to 
be, for more than seventy years, the pocket companion of every 
British field botanist. We have now in the British Museum 
library a number of copies bound in green morocco enriched 
by the notes of the leading botanists of the eighteenth century, 
who received these volumes as prizes from the Society of 
Apothecaries. The Methodus, the Historia and the Synopsis 
may be said to form the triple tiara of Ray’s botanical fame. 
At the suggestion of friends, he next turned to the preparation 
on parallel lines of a Synopsis of Quadrupeds and Serpents , 
which he seems to have completed within the year 1692-3. 
His classification, based upon the digits and teeth, distinguishing 
much as we recognise them to-day the Solidungula, Ruminants 
Pachyderms, Proboscideans, and Primates, has been described 
as the first truly systematic arrangement of these groups 
since the days of Aristotle. Hallam praises his methods in that 
he first makes systematic use of comparative anatomy, describing 
in detail dissections made by himself and others ; while Cuvier 
terms his zoological work as a whole “ even more important than 
his work for botany.” 
From about 1690, Ray’s studies were largely devoted to 
insects, that group alone being wanting to complete his survey 
