154 A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN.
the first volume of the Historia Plantarum in 1686, Ray first
mentions the help he had received from Samuel Dale, then only
27, whom he describes as "physician and apothecary, our friend
and neighbour, living in Braintree, who has carefully examined
the synonymy, corrected errors and supplied omissions." In
the preface to his Pharmacologia, first published in 1693, Dale
expressly states—what Pulteney only infers—that he owed
his initiation into botany to Ray ; and we can certainly say
that, though 30 years Ray's junior, he was to stand for the
remaining 20 years of Ray's life in much the same position
that Willughby had occupied before.
In 1690, although some years before he uncomplainingly
records that feeble health, accompanied by distressing ulcers
in his legs, confined him to his house and its immediate sur-
roundings, Ray made use of the classification, then made known
by his Historia, to recast his alphabetical Catalogus Plantarum
Angliae into a systematic form. The result was that Synopsis
Methodica Stirpium Britannicarum, the first systematic British
Flora, which, with its two later editions of 1696 and 1724, was to
be, for more than seventy years, the pocket companion of every
British field botanist. We have now in the British Museum
library a number of copies bound in green morocco enriched
by the notes of the leading botanists of the eighteenth century,
who received these volumes as prizes from the Society of
Apothecaries. The Methodus, the Historia and the Synopsis
may be said to form the triple tiara of Ray's botanical fame.
At the suggestion of friends, he next turned to the preparation
on parallel lines of a Synopsis of Quadrupeds and Serpents,
which he seems to have completed within the year 1692-3.
His classification, based upon the digits and teeth, distinguishing
much as we recognise them to-day the Solidungula, Ruminants
Pachyderms, Proboscideans, and Primates, has been described
as the first truly systematic arrangement of these groups
since the days of Aristotle. Hallam praises his methods in that
he first makes systematic use of comparative anatomy, describing
in detail dissections made by himself and others ; while Cuvier
terms his zoological work as a whole "even more important than
his work for botany."
From about 1690, Ray's studies were largely devoted to
insects, that group alone being wanting to complete his survey