178 The Life and Work of John Ray, and 
“ Who best your wise Creator’s praise declare, 
Since best to praise his works is best to know. 
0, truly Eoyal! who behold the law 
And rule of beings in your Maker’s mind,” 
in his ‘ Annus Mirabilis,’ 1666. 
But one month, however, after the incorporation of the 
Royal Society, Charles signed the “Act of Uniformity,” by 
which two thousand conscientious clergy were deprived of 
their livings. It was not that Ray, or many others among 
them, were either Presbyterians or had taken the Covenant, 
for Ray frequently expressed his disapproval of that oath and 
of separatists, and declared on his death-bed that he died, as 
he had lived, a priest of the Church of England,—a fact 
alluded to in his epitaph,—but he declined to swear, as 
required, that the oath of the Covenant was not binding on 
those who had taken it. Ray accordingly, with twelve others, 
resigned their fellowships, and abandoned all hope of clerical 
preferment. 
In 1668 Ray issued a small appendix to his Catalogue of 
Cambridge plants, and in the spring set out with Francis 
Willughby, Philip Skippon, and Nathaniel Bacon, three of 
his pupils, for a tour on the Continent, where he remained 
for three years, visiting France, Holland, Germany, Switzer¬ 
land, Italy, Sicily, and Malta, a journey of which he afterwards 
rendered an ample account. 
We fortunately possess a large series of Ray’s letters, some 
of which have been printed in an incomplete form by Dr. 
Derharn and Dr. Lankester ; but the manuscripts of most of 
which are in the British Museum; and from them we can 
gather many details as to Ray’s life after leaving Cambridge. 
In 1666 he seems to have visited his friend, Dr. Martin 
Lister, the well-known zoologist, at St. John’s College, Cam¬ 
bridge, of which he (Lister) was a fellow, and then to have 
been at his native place and with friends in Sussex, and to 
have read Hooke’s ‘ Micrographia,’ Sydenham on Fevers, and 
various works by Boyle and others that had appeared during 
his absence abroad. In the winter of the same year he 
seems to have been with Willughby at Middleton, in Warwick¬ 
shire, arranging his collections, and, with his assistance, 
