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Journal of Proceedings.
as tutor and companion to Francis Willughby, at Middleton, until
his death in 1672, and having there married Margaret Oakeley in 1673,
the care of Willughby's children being taken from him in l676, Bay
moved from Warwickshire at Michaelmas. 1677, to Faulkbourne Hall.
The. hall was then in the possession of Edward Bullock. Esq., to whose
son he probably acted as tutor. In 1694 he dedicated his ' Stirpium
Europaearum extra Britannias Nascentium Sylloge,' to this younger
Edward Bullock.
In his diary Ray writes :—" March 15th, 1678, being Saturday,
departed this life, my most dear and honoured mother, Elizabeth Bay,
of Black Notley, in her house on Dewlands, in the hall-chamber, about
three of the clock in the afternoon, aged, as I suppose, seventy-eight."
The naturalist was probably with her at the time, and on the 24th of
June, 1679, i.e., of the following June, he moved to the Dewlands,
" where," he says, " I intend, God willing, to settle for the short pittance
of time I have yet to live in this world," and where he did actually
pass the remaining twenty-five and a-half years of his life in industrious
scientific research. There is no good reason for supposing the Dew-
lands to have been the birthplace of the naturalist, that being more
probably the house adjoining the village forge, nearer to the church.
Derham, indeed, speaks, in the concluding sentence of his Life, of Ray's
dying " at Black Notley (in a house of his own building)," and this was
certainly the Dewlands.
Among the chief works he had already published in 1679 were the
Cambridge ' Catalogus,' the ' Collection of Proverbs,' the ' Catalogus
Plantarum Angliae,' and Willughby's Ornithology, the English edition
of which appeared in 1678. In 1682 he published his ' Methodus Plan-
tarum,' and I find in the originals of his letters that he began to
compile his magnum opus, the ' Historia Plantarum,' in the following
year, being, mirabile dictu, simultaueously occupied in the final revision
of Willughby's ' Ichthyology.' On August 12th, 1684, his wife presented
him with twin daughters, and his family in all numbered four girls,
three of whom survived him, Mary, one of the twins, dying in 1697,
Ray's wonderful industry enabled him to publish the first volume of
his Historia in 1686, and the second in 1688, without the aid of an
amanuensis, and in spite of such bad health—he then beginning to
suffer, owing to his sedentary life, from ulcers in the legs—as caused
him more than once to despair of ever completing his task. His con-
scientiousness and some of his difficulties are shown by the following
extract from a letter written at the time :—
. . . . This Lr. should have been sent last Post; but ye boy
having no Lrs. for me did not call. Mr. Fairthorne writes me, that
you advised to adde to the Brief Act. I sent him of ye HP. these
words, as also a particular description of their torts as Roots, leaf,
flower, seed &c., taken from ye life, which I cannot allow, it being not
true, the far greater number of descriptions being transcribed out of
books, and in the rest there being no more particular descriptions of
parts than are to be found in many histories in books. I did not intend
the work should have been printed by subscription. I doe not love to
draw in men to subscribe as I like not myself to be so, but that every
one should have his free liberty whether he would purchase the book or
no : and if no Booksellers dare venture upon it without subscriptions, I
am well content it should rest, and be suppressed. When they desired
such an account of the work I thought they intended no more than to
show it to particular friends and acquaintance, not to make publick Pro-
positions for subscriptions. Iterum vale."
Having completed nearly 2,000 pages, describing nearly 7,000 species,
besides giving an admirable epitome of the existing knowledge of plant