A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN 
*57 
16, Dale was apprenticed to Thomas Wells, an apothecary, 
for eight years, the end of which term would bring us within 
the period at which Ray had settled down at Dewlands for the 
final period of his life’s work ; and the next fact we have concern¬ 
ing Dale is the acknowledgment of considerable assistance, 
made by Ray in the preface to his first volume of the Historia 
Plantarum, published in 1686, when, as I have said, Dale was 
only 27. Further acknowledgments of assistance occur in a 
little supplement to the Catalogus Plantarum, which Ray issued 
in 1688, in the first and second editions of the Synopsis in 1690 
and 1696, and in the third volume of the Historia in 1764. These 
include the acknowledgment of a supplementary list of fungi 
received while the Synopsis of 1696 was in the press ; while 
Ray not only speaks of Dale as a thorough botanist and as one 
of the three men who had given him most help in his Historia, 
but can be shown from records in the books themselves to have, 
owing to his own feeble health and engrossing toil, relied upon 
Dale for plants even from this immediate neighbourhood. The 
earliest date borne by any of the specimens in Dale’s herbarium, 
by any of his 84 extant letters to Sir Hans Sloane, or by any 
of his contributions to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal 
Society, is 1692, the year before the publication of the Phar¬ 
macologia. The majority of the earlier letters to Sloane 
are enquiries as to the cases of his patients, Sloane having an 
enormous correspondence of this kind with country practitioners, 
or requests for suggestions as to the Pharmacologia ; but as, 
like Ray, Dale also writes to borrow books from Sloane and 
acknowledges his help in the Preface to his Pharmacologia, with 
that of Ray, Dr. Tancred Robinson, Plukenet, Dr. Martin 
Lister, Samuel Doody, keeper of the Society of Apothecaries’ 
Chelsea Physic Garden, and others, it would seem that, perhaps, 
his intimacy with Ray, and the greater possibility of visiting 
London which a young and active man would enjoy, may have 
already secured for Dale the friendship of many men of science 
The publication of the Pharmacologia in 1693—the same 
year as Ray’s Synopsis Animalium and Travels —no doubt 
secured its author general recognition. The first systematic 
work on its subject as a whole—mineral, vegetable, and animal 
drugs being included—dedicated to the Royal College of Physi¬ 
cians, and reviewed at length in the Philosophical Transactions 
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