A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN. 153
destined soon to be overshadowed by the simpler artificial
grouping of Linnaeus, when altered and amended (as it was by
himself in 1703), "unquestionably formed," as Lindley has said,
the basis of that Natural System which is universally received
to-day.
The accidental death of Morison in 1683 turned Ray's
attention to an ambitious scheme that he had previously abandon-
ed from unwillingness to seem to compete with the Oxford
professor, viz., a general history of plants. Such was his industry
that, in addition to Willughby's History of Fishes, a folio of 370
pages, more than half of which was Ray's work, the year 1686
saw the issue of the first volume of the Historia Plantarum,
containing nearly 1,000 pages, the second—of equal bulk —
following two years later:—the whole being completed with-
out even the help of an amanuensis.
The first volume contains a most remarkable summary of
all that was then known in vegetable histology and physiology
under the title "De Plantis in Genere"—"a general account of
the science in 58 pages," says Prof. Julius Sachs, "which, printed
in ordinary size, would itself make a small volume, and which
treats of the whole of theoretical botany in the style of a modem
text-book." "We believe," write Cuvier and Dupetit-Thouars,
"that the best monument that could be erected to the memory
of Ray would be the republication of this part of his work in a
separate form." Sir James Smith, the profound admirer of
Linnaeus, speaks of Ray as "the most accurate, the most philo-
sophical and the most faithful amongst all the botanists of
our own, or perhaps any other times" ; and Sachs, while in-
sisting on Ray's indebtedness for his precise terminology to
Joachim Jung (whose manuscript notes Ray acknowledges he
had seen, probably through the agency of the learned Pole, Samuel
Hartlib, as early as 1660), adds that Jung's work was "enriched
by Ray's good morphological remarks." The completeness
of Ray's work may be gauged from the fact that the first two
volumes of the Historia describes 6,900 species, as against
3,500 in Bauhin's History of some 35 years before, and the third
volume 11,700 species more, a total of over 18,000 species: his
caution is seen in that he as yet only admitted Grew's discovery
of the sexuality of plants as "probable."
To us to-day, it is interesting to note that, in the Preface to