158 A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN'. 
for October in the year of its publication, its real merits of careful 
discrimination, and of succinct and accurate description, were 
bound to gain an acknowledgment of its value. 
The preface contains the acknowledgment, to which I have 
already referred, that it was to Ray that he owed his first initia¬ 
tion into science ; to which he adds ‘‘ I have made progress and 
have laboured not without fruit. Witnesses of this are my 
Botanical Elucubrations, written in English and destined some 
day, if the fates permit, to see the light.” These were, no doubt, 
“ the History of English Plants,” which, in a letter to Sloane of 
1717, he says he had “many years ago began, and made con¬ 
siderable progress in it then, but have long discontinued it by 
reason of the death of Henry Faithorn,” Faithorn being printer 
to the Royal Society. 
Though he has often been described as a Fellow of the Royal 
Society, Dale never was one ; but he contributed nine papers 
to its Transactions between 1692 and 1732 dealing with a variety 
of topics from medical cases, and bread made of turnips in the 
famine year of 1693, to the insects of Colchester, the sea-shells 
of Harwich, Saxon coins in Suffolk, and the fossil Mollusca of 
the Crag at Harwich, Bawdsey, and elsewhere. 
This last was, perhaps, the most important of these papers. 
It is dated 1703 and describes 2S species of fossil Mollusca, 
while Dale was admitted by Woodward to have been the first 
to describe such deposits. 
It is obvious from his herbarium, and from these papers, 
that Dale rode to considerable distances from Braintree, in the 
exercise, doubtless, of his profession, his journeys often extending 
into Suffolk, especially to Sudbury, where dwelt a fellow prac¬ 
titioner of kindred tastes, one Joseph Andrews. His visits to 
London seem to have become more frequent after the death of 
Ray,when, perhaps, he had more friends among London botanists. 
In 1699 James Petiver, Sloane’s apothecary, an ardent botan¬ 
ist and collector, and Rev. Adam Buddie, who was at one time 
at Southminster, and who was, perhaps, the most profound stu¬ 
dent of British plants of the age, paid a visit to Ray at Black 
Notley, and from this date onwards, we have, preserved with 
Sloane’s MSS., a series of letters from Dale to Petiver, which 
include those announcing the final illness and death of the 
great naturalist. So, too, it is after the visit paid to Black Notley 
