A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN 157
16, Dale was apprenticed to Thomas Wells, an apothecary,
for eight years, the end of which term would bring us within
the period at which Ray had settled down at Dewlands for the
final period of his life's work ; and the next fact we have concern-
ing Dale is the acknowledgment of considerable assistance,
made by Ray in the preface to his first volume of the Historia
Plantarum, published in 1686, when, as I have said, Dale was
only 27. Further acknowledgments of assistance occur in a
little supplement to the Catalogus Plantarum, which Ray issued
in 1688, in the first and second editions of the Synopsis in 1690
and 1696, and in the third volume of the Historia in 1704. These
include the acknowledgment of a supplementary list of fungi
received while the Synopsis of 1696 was in the press ; while
Ray not only speaks of Dale as a thorough botanist and as one
of the three men who had given him most help in his Historia,
but can be shown from records in the books themselves to have,
owing to his own feeble health and engrossing toil, relied upon
Dale for plants even from this immediate neighbourhood. The
earliest date borne by any of the specimens in Dale's herbarium,
by any of his 84 extant letters to Sir Hans Sloane, or by any
of his contributions to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society, is 1692, the year before the publication of the Phar-
macologia. The majority of the earlier letters to Sloane
are enquiries as to the cases of his patients, Sloane having an
enormous correspondence of this kind with country practitioners,
or requests for suggestions as to the Pharmacologia ; but as,
like Ray, Dale also writes to borrow books from Sloane and
acknowledges his help in the Preface to his Pharmacologia, with
that of Ray, Dr. Tancred Robinson, Plukenet, Dr. Martin
Lister, Samuel Doody, keeper of the Society of Apothecaries'
Chelsea Physic Garden, and others, it would seem that, perhaps,
his intimacy with Ray, and the greater possibility of visiting
London which a young and active man would enjoy, may have
already secured for Dale the friendship of many men of science
The publication of the Pharmacologia in 1693—the same
year as Ray's Synopsis Animalium and Travels—no doubt
secured its author general recognition. The first systematic
work on its subject as a whole—mineral, vegetable, and animal
drugs being included—dedicated to the Royal College of Physi-
cians, and reviewed at length in the Philosophical Transactions
M