Tables of Plants from his Methodus Emendata et Aucta, he had time to revise and remodel his system. Morison, on the contrary, was prevented by unfavourable circumstances from beginning the publication of his Method until late in life, and he was not permitted to see more than a fragment of it issue from the press.
It is probable that Ray was more truly a naturalist than was Morison: for in addition to his works on Method, he published not only his Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium (1660), but also a Catalogus of British plants (1670, 2nd ed. 1677), almost the earliest work of the kind, only preceded by William How's Phytologia Britannica (1650), which developed into the first British Flora arranged systematically, the Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britannicarum (1690, 2nd ed. 1696). Morison published nothing on field-botany; his volume of the Historia contains, it is true, occasional mention of plants found in or near Oxford, but the finder of them seems always to have been the younger Bobart. Ray included in the Synopsis a list of plants that had been communicated to him by Bobart, with whom he seems to have been intimate, and expressed his indebtedness to Bobart's botanical skill.
But whether the palm be bestowed upon the one or the other, the fact remains that both were men of exceptional capacity, and that both did good work for British Botany, raising it to a level which commanded the respect and admiration of the botanical world; from which, as the succeeding lectures of this course will show, it was not allowed to sink. What Linnaeus said of Morison may be applied equally to Ray, "Roma certe non uno die, nec ab uno condebatur viro. Ille tamen faces extinctas incendit, a quibus ignem mutuati sunt subsequentes, quibus datum ad lucidum magis focum objecta rimare" (Classes Plantarum, p. 33).
