158 A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN.
for October in the year of its publication, its real merits of careful
discrimination, and of succinct and accurate description, were
bound to gain an acknowledgment of its value.
The preface contains the acknowledgment, to which I have
already referred, that it was to Ray that he owed his first initia-
tion into science ; to which he adds ''I have made progress and
have laboured not without fruit. Witnesses of this are my
Botanical Elucubrations, written in English and destined some
day, if the fates permit, to see the light." These were, no doubt,
"the History of English Plants," which, in a letter to Sloane of
1717, he says he had "many years ago began, and made con-
siderable progress in it then, but have long discontinued it by
reason of the death of Henry Faithorn," Faithorn being printer
to the Royal Society.
Though he has often been described as a Fellow of the Royal
Society, Dale never was one ; but he contributed nine papers
to its Transactions between 1692 and 1732 dealing with a variety
of topics from medical cases, and bread made of turnips in the
famine year of 1693, to the insects of Colchester, the sea-shells
of Harwich, Saxon coins in Suffolk, and the fossil Mollusca of
the Crag at Harwich, Bawdsey, and elsewhere.
This last was, perhaps, the most important of these papers.
It is dated 1703 and describes 28 species of fossil Mollusca,
while Dale was admitted by Woodward to have been the first
to describe such deposits.
It is obvious from his herbarium, and from these papers,
that Dale rode to considerable distances from Braintree, in the
exercise, doubtless, of his profession, his journeys often extending
into Suffolk, especially to Sudbury, where dwelt a fellow prac-
titioner of kindred tastes, one Joseph Andrews. His visits to
London seem to have become more frequent after the death of
Ray, when, perhaps, he had more friends among London botanists.
In 1699 James Petiver, Sloane's apothecary, an ardent botan-
ist and collector, and Rev. Adam Buddie, who was at one time
at Southminster, and who was, perhaps, the most profound stu-
dent of British plants of the age, paid a visit to Ray at Black
Notley, and from this date onwards, we have, preserved with
Sloane's MSS., a series of letters from Dale to Petiver, which
include those announcing the final illness and death of the
great naturalist. So, too, it is after the visit paid to Black Notley