their relation to the Progress of Science. 
175 
of Wilkins in the Mastership of Trinity, and on Mr. John 
Nid, a senior fellow, who assisted him in his botanical work, 
were thus delivered, though he was not ordained till 1660. 
These sermons entitle him to rank as the Paley, if not the 
Butler, of his age, as one of the chiefs of that school of 
Latitudinarian Theology, of which Hales and Chillingworth 
were the founders, and Burnet, Tillotson, and Butler the 
future exponents,—a school characterised “ by their oppo¬ 
sition to dogma, by their preference of reason to tradition, 
whether of the Bible or the Church, by their basing religion on 
a natural Theology, by their aiming at rightness of life rather 
than at correctness of opinion, by their advocacy of toleration 
and comprehension as the grounds of Christian unity.” 
Between 1657 and 1660 Bay was chosen to various honour¬ 
able offices in his college, being Junior Dean in 1658, and 
Steward in 1659, and in December, 1660, in which month 
he was ordained both deacon and priest by Sanderson, Bishop 
of Lincoln. To this period belongs the first of those tours, 
mainly botanical in their object, of which we possess Bay’s 
own diaries or itineraries. In August and September, 1658, 
he travelled alone through the Midland Counties and North 
Wales ; and in 1660 appeared his first published work, the 
‘ Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium,’ a 
small duodecimo enumerating only 626 species in the alpha¬ 
betical order of their Latin names, but marking an epoch in 
the history of British Botany, no less than in the life of its 
author. It was the first local catalogue issued in England, 
and is remarkable for the care with which the synonymy is 
collected from Gerard, Parkinson, the Bauhins, and others, 
for the notes on the uses and varieties of plants, the structure 
of the flower, &c., and for the descriptions of new species. 
Botany was at this date in the same empiric stage as that in 
which William Turner had found it in 1588: Gerard, John¬ 
son, Parkinson, and others had published herbals, mere un¬ 
systematic catalogues of but roughly discriminated species 
from all parts of the world, with copious medical disquisitions, 
on their real or imaginary uses as drugs, gathered out of 
Dioscorides, or still more largely out of Dodoens blemish 
