164
A EULOGY OF RAY, DALE AND ALLEN.
to the Royal Society in 1729, one "A Further Account of the
Generation of Eels," the other describing his dissection of a whale
at Maldon 12 years before, neither of which appear to have been
published, are preserved in the Society's library.
An industrious, painstaking, and successful physician (among
whose patients it is interesting to notice not only Ray and his
family, and Mr. Pyke, Rector of Black Notley, but also
Sir William Dawes, Dean of Bocking and afterwards Archbishop
of York, and one or more of the Earls of Warwick of the family
of Rich) and a careful entomological observer, if a somewhat
bewildering writer, Allen may be considered worthy to lie, as a
humble satellite, beside a great luminary, in the quiet God's
Acre at Notley by the side of Ray.
It is pleasant to think of the friendship of these three men,
of that rarer single-hearted devotion to the search after truth,
pleasant too to read how completely Dale and Allen recognized
the transcendent genius of Ray, the greatest of English botanists,
the greatest zoologist who had lived since Aristotle founded
the science. Braintree may well be proud of three such sons :
Essex that they lived and died within her boundary : England
that they are hers.
In the words of the greatest of Athenian statesmen that appear
on Ray's monument—
" Of illustrious men the whole earth is the tomb," or as Mr.
Overton rendered it :—
" Not in narrow cloture of churchyard obscure,
Repose the illustrious dead :
The earth's wide womb for them is the tomb
With the starry vault o'erhead."