174 The Life and Work of John Ray, and,
of St. Gabriel, Fenchurch Street, and Secretary to the West-
minster Assembly, and afterwards Savilian Professor of
Geometry at Oxford. Fifty years later the latter wrote of
these early days:—"Our business was (precluding matters
of Theology and State-affairs) to discourse and consider
of philosophical enquiries,.......some of which were
then but new discoveries, and others not so generally known
and embraced as they now are ; with other things pertaining
to what hath been called the New Philosophy, which, from the
times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord
Verulam) in England, hath been much cultivated." ....
In 1646 Ray left Catherine Hall for Trinity College, to be
under the tuition of Dr. Duport, the teacher, and predecessor
in the Begins Professorship of Greek, of Isaac Barrow ; and,
having probably graduated together in 1648, the two fellow-
students were elected to Minor Fellowships in 1649,—the
year in which Wallis's appointment to the Savilian Professor-
ship transferred the active centre of scientific study from
London to Oxford, whither Wilkins had gone in the previous
year, and where, at the rooms of Dr. William Petty, the first
of English economists, at Wadham College, and at the house
of Robert Boyle, where Lady Ranelagh acted as hostess, the
gatherings, previously held in London, were resumed.
The varied character of Ray's erudition is evinced by his
appointment as Greek lecturer of his college in 1651, as
mathematical lecturer in 1653, and humanity reader in 1655,
he having taken his Master's degree in 1651. Dr. Derham,
whose brief 'Memorials,' published in 1760, are the chief
contribution we yet have towards a biography of Ray, states
that he was a good Hebrew scholar, an excellent orator, and,
even in the early part of his Cambridge career, a student of
Natural History; whilst we have independent testimony to
his skill as a tutor, and to the solid character of his preaching.
It was then customary for sermons to be preached at Cam-
bridge by graduates not in Holy Orders ; and Ray's 'Wisdom
of God in Creation' first published in 1691, his three dis-
courses concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World,
and his funeral sermons on Dr. Arrowsmith, the predecessor