their relation to the Progress of Science. 179
drawing up the synoptical tables of plants and animals for
Dr. Wilkins' 'Essay towards a Real Character and a Philo-
sophical Language,' published in 1668. These tables are of
great importance, since they are the germs of all his sub-
sequent systematic work, to which he mainly owes his pre-
eminent rank in science. At the same time he was engaged
in drawing up a general catalogue of the plants. which he
had seen wild in England, though he had no immediate
intention of publishing it, since, as he writes to Lister, the
world was "glutted with Dr. Merrett's bungling Pinax," this
much-abused book having appeared in 1666.
In June, 1667, Ray and Willughby set out on a second
visit to the south-western counties, and on their return to
London, Ray was persuaded to become a Fellow of the Royal
Society, to which he was admitted on November 7th. Soon
after this he was persuaded, owing to the generally known
beauty of his Latinity, to translate Wilkins' 'Real Character'
into Latin; but the translation has never been published.
He then went on a round of visits to his former pupils, and,
in the autumn of 1668 on a tour into Yorkshire and West-
moreland, returning in September to Middleton Hall to spend
the winter with Willughby, then newly married.
In the spring of 1669 these two congenial companions
conducted a series of most useful experiments upon the
motion of the sap in trees, especially in the Birch and
Sycamore, which were printed in the fourth volume of the
'Philosophical Transactions' (1669). At the same time Ray
prepared for the press two independent works, more important
than his caution had permitted him to issue before his forty-
third year, his 'Collection of English Proverbs' and his
'Catalogus Plantarum Angliae.' The first of these works,
one result of his English tours, has gone through repeated
editions, and is still the basis of our existing collections ; but
the 'Catalogue of English Plants' is yet more important,
being, with the exception of How's 'Phytologia Botanica,'
published twenty years before, the first work that can in any
way be called an English Flora. How enumerated 1200 spe-
cies, and Merrett in his 'Pinax' (1666) upwards of 1400;