their relation to the Progress of Science.
175
of Wilkins in the Mastership of Trinity, and on Mr. John
Nid, a senior fellow, who assisted him in his botanical work,
were thus delivered, though he was not ordained till 1660.
These sermons entitle him to rank as the Paley, if not the
Butler, of his age, as one of the chiefs of that school of
Latitudinarian Theology, of which Hales and Chillingworth
were the founders, and Burnet, Tillotson, and Butler the
future exponents,—a school characterised " by their oppo-
sition to dogma, by their preference of reason to tradition,
whether of the Bible or the Church, by their basing religion on
a natural Theology, by their aiming at Tightness of life rather
than at correctness of opinion, by their advocacy of toleration
and comprehension as the grounds of Christian unity."
Between 1657 and 1660 Ray was chosen to various honour-
able offices in his college, being Junior Dean in 1658, and
Steward in 1659, and in December, 1660, in which month
he was ordained both deacon and priest by Sanderson, Bishop
of Lincoln. To this period belongs the first of those tours,
mainly botanical in their object, of which we possess Kay's
own diaries or itineraries. In August and September, 1658,
he travelled alone through the Midland Counties and North
Wales ; and in 1660 appeared his first published work, the
'Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium,' a
small duodecimo enumerating only 626 species in the alpha-
betical order of their Latin names, but marking an epoch in
the history of British Botany, no less than in the life of its
author. It was the first local catalogue issued in England,
and is remarkable for the care with which the synonymy is
collected from Gerard, Parkinson, the Bauhins, and others,
for the notes on the uses and varieties of plants, the structure
of the flower, &c, and for the descriptions of new species.
Botany was at this date in the same empiric stage as that in
which William Turner had found it in 1538: Gerard, John-
son, Parkinson, and others had published herbals, mere un-
systematic catalogues of but roughly discriminated species
from all parts of the world, with copious medical disquisitions,
on their real or imaginary uses as drugs, gathered out of
Dioscorides, or still more largely out of Dodoens' Flemish