174 
The Life and Work of John Piay, and 
of St. Gabriel, Fenchurch Street, and Secretary to the West¬ 
minster Assembly, and afterwards Savilian Professor of 
Geometry at Oxford. Fifty years later the latter wrote of 
these early days:—“Our business was (precluding matters 
of Theology and State-affairs) to discourse and consider 
of philosophical enquiries,.some of which were 
then but new discoveries, and others not so generally known 
and embraced as they now are ; with other things pertaining 
to what hath been called the New Philosophy, which, from the 
times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord 
Verulam) in England, hath been much cultivated.” .... 
In 1646 Ray left Catherine Hall for Trinity College, to be 
under the tuition of Dr. Duport, the teacher, and predecessor 
in the Regius Professorship of Greek, of Isaac Barrow ; and, 
having probably graduated together in 1648, the two fellow- 
students were elected to Minor Fellowships in 1649,—the 
year in which Wallis’s appointment to the Savilian Professor¬ 
ship transferred the active centre of scientific study from 
London to Oxford, whither Wilkins had gone in the previous 
year, and where, at the rooms of Dr. William Petty, the first 
of English economists, at Wadham College, and at the house 
of Robert Boyle, where Lady Ranelagh acted as hostess, the 
gatherings, previously held in London, were resumed. 
The varied character of Ray’s erudition is evinced by his 
appointment as Greek lecturer of his college in 1651, as 
mathematical lecturer in 1658, and humanity reader in 1655, 
he having taken his Master’s degree in 1651. Dr. Derham, 
whose brief ‘Memorials,’ published in 1760, are the chief 
contribution we yet have towards a biography of Ray, states 
that he was a good Hebrew scholar, an excellent orator, and, 
even in the early part of his Cambridge career, a student of 
Natural History; whilst we have independent testimony to 
his skill as a tutor, and to the solid character of his preaching. 
It was then customary for sermons to be preached at Cam¬ 
bridge by graduates not in Holy Orders ; and Ray’s ‘ Wisdom 
of God in Creation,’ first published in 1691, his three dis¬ 
courses concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the W orld, 
and his funeral sermons on Dr. Arrowsmitli, the predecessor 
