A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN. 151
germ of all that subsequent systematic work upon which his
fame mainly depends. Well-known as a writer of pure Latin,
Ray was persuaded by Wilkins to translate this essay into
Latin ; but his translation has never been published, and is
apparently lost.
On returning to London after a second tour into Cornwall,
with Willughby, in the summer of 1667, Ray was persuaded to
join the Royal Society, and it was for its Philosophical Trans-
actions that, a year later, they began a lengthy series of valuable
experiments on the motion of sap in trees. Willughby's marriage
made no difference in the friendly collaboration of the two
naturalists, save that Ray made two more summer journeys
into the north by himself, or accompanied only by Thomas
Willisel, an old Cromwellian soldier, who acted as assistant-
collector to several of the botanists of the time. When, however,
in 1672, Willughby died at 37, he left to his own old tutor the
education of his voting children and an annuity of £60, which
constituted Ray's main income for the remainder of his life ;
while the completion of the works upon which they had been
jointly engaged was made by Ray one of the main purposes of
his labours. In 1670, he had published his alphabetical catalogue
of English flowering plants, the first draft, so to speak, of his
Synopsis, and his Collection of Proverbs, which the modern study
of folk-lore has kept alive as a book still of interest to-day.
After this, we read of no more journeys. An offer of £200 a year
to accompany three young noblemen on the Continent has to be
declined on the score of health ; and a prodigious literary and
scientific output fully accounts for the last thirty years of his
life. Marrying in 1673, at 46, a young woman of 20, Margaret
Oakeley, who seems to have been a nursery governess at Middle-
ton, Ray published in that year the account of his foreign tour,
with a catalogue of the plants of the countries visited, and in
the following year a Collection of English Words not generally
used (which is, in fact, a dialect dictionary), with lists of English
birds and fishes and an account of English methods of mining
and smelting metals. In 1675, he thought it opportune to pre-
pare for his very-juvenile pupils a little tri-lingual dictionary or
vocabulary of English, Latin, and Greek, which proved so useful
that it went through five editions ; and, by 1676, he had completed
and published his friend's Ornithologia. This work was, says