A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN 145
MISCELLANEOUS.
Salt (anent Red-hills).—"For it is gendered of sea water
by working of the sunne : for some of the sea abideth at cliffes
and is dried with the sunne, and is sometimes drawn out of salt-
pits and sodde till water turne into hardnesse of salt, that was
fleeting before, and so made hard and thicke with heat."—
Batman uppon Bartholome, His Booke, De Proprietatibus Rerum
(1582) Bk. 16, c. 95.
JOHN RAY, SAMUEL DALE, AND BENJAMIN
ALLEN: A EULOGY.
Delivered at the Meeting of the Club at Braintree, 27th April 1912.
By Prof. G. S. BOULGER, F.L.S., F.G.S., Ac, Vice-President of the Essex Field Club.
THE main purpose of our coming together to-day is to
do honour to the memory of three Essex worthies.
Unlike Mark Antony, we come not to bury them, but to praise
them.
I should be sorry to think, with regard to one at least
of the three, John Ray, that it may be suggested it is neces-
sary, in so doing, that we should resuscitate a forgotten reputa-
tion. It cannot, I think, be doubted that it is more difficult
to acquire a lasting reputation in science than it is in art—by
work, that is, of pure reason, as distinguished from works of
the imagination. The imaginative genius, whether poet or
painter, scarcely seems to be the product of a slow process
of orderly evolution. He seems to burst upon his age like
Athene fully armed from the head of Zeus ; or shall we say,
with Wordsworth,
" Trailing clouds of glory
" And by the vision splendid
" Is on his way attended . [from] "
" That Imperial palace whence he came " ?
The man of science, on the other hand, is but the heir of
preceding ages : he builds on the foundations laid, more or less
securely, by his forerunners ; or, perhaps, we should rather say,
he does but pick up a few pretty shells from the shores of the
great ocean of truth and add them to the frail grotto begun by
those before him.