their relation to the Progress of Science. 
188 
Morison, Professor of Botany at Oxford, redirected his atten¬ 
tion to an ambitions scheme previously abandoned in his 
favour, viz ., the preparation of a general History of Plants, 
such as the Bauhins had attempted in the preceding genera¬ 
tion. With wonderful rapidity he issued the first folio 
volume of this work in 1686, and the second in 1688, each 
containing nearly a thousand pages, the entire work being 
done without even the help of an amanuensis; and this in 
spite of the fact that from about this time for the remainder 
of his life he was troubled with most painful ulcers in his legs. 
To the first volume he prefixed a list of nearly 100 authorities, 
a glossary of terms, and a most comprehensive summary of 
all that had been done up to that date in vegetable histology 
and physiology, the researches of Grew, Malpighi, and others. 
Of this dissertation Cuvier and Dupetit Thouaro write, “We 
believe that the best monument that could be erected to the 
memory of Bay would be the republication of this part of his 
work in a separate form.” His habitual caution is evinced by 
his only admitting Grew’s discovery of the sexuality of plants 
as “probable,” and the magnitude of the descriptive work 
achieved may be gauged from the fact that the two volumes 
enumerate about 6900 plants, as against 3500 in John 
Bauhin’s ‘ History’ of the year 1650. In the preface to the 
first volume of his ‘ Historia ’ Bay first mentions the assistance 
he had received from his neighbour, Samuel Dale, a young 
apothecary and physician living at Braintree, who during the 
great naturalist’s later years occupied towards him much the 
same position that Francis Willughby had done fifteen or 
twenty years before. 
In 1686, moreover, the Boyal Society issued Willughby’s 
‘ Historia Piscium,’ more than half of which was the work of 
Bay. Cuvier speaks of these, and of Bay’s succeeding 
zoological works, as being “yet more important” than his 
botanical works, being “the basis of all modern Zoology.” 
Whilst contemplating a recasting of his ‘ Catalogue of 
English Plants,’ now again out of print, into a systematic 
form, Bay in 1688 issued a small Fasciculus as an appendix 
to it; and in 1690 appeared that ‘ Synopsis Methodica 
