146 A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN.
The achievement of the artist, moreover, remains—the
marble speaking to far distant ages, the fresco painting to be
copied and sent to the uttermost ends of the earth when it shall
have faded from the monastery wall, or the poem, "monumentum
aere perennius."
But what of the work of the man of science ? It was but a
foundation hidden by the superstructure, a roughly-polished
gem to be subsequently re-cut, mere old bricks worn beyond
recognition by later criticism and built into a structure bearing
no resemblance to that of which they originally formed a part.
Who remembers the careful observer, the sound reasoner, or
the industrious recorder of the early days of science ? In
literature or art we reverently worship the glories of the past :
in science we constantly strive to add something new to the
store of knowledge : the text-book of ten years ago is dangerously
misleading : we want the latest work of yesterday or, rather, we
are looking forward to that of to-morrow.
To the man in the street, to whom the names at least of
Shakespeare and Milton, of Dryden and of Pope, of Reynolds
and Gainsborough, Hogarth and Constable will be known, I
fear that the name of John Ray, not to presume to mention those
of Samuel Dale and Benjamin Allen, may convey little or nothing
—even in Braintree itself. To-day, however, I would appeal
from the man in the street to those who take some interest in
the history of science and in the lives and work of those men in
the past to whom We are so much indebted for the present
position of our knowledge.
The seventeenth century saw a renaissance of pure science
based upon observation and experiment. However much truth
there may be in the flippant comment that the Lord Chancellor
Francis Bacon wrote about science like—a Lord Chancellor,
we have the express testimony of the founders of the Royal
Society that their business was to consider things pertaining
to what had been called his "New Philosophy." The student of
plants and animals was no longer primarily concerned, as he
had been in the 15th century, with the opinions of Aristotle,
Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and other ancient writers, as to the
identity, structure and physiology of the organisms in question :
he was not now to give his chief attention to the medicinal
uses of the plants he studied, as had, almost without exception