eldest of these youths was created a baronet at the age of ten years, but died before he was twenty. Their sister, Cassandra, afterwards married the Duke of Chandos. Thomas, the younger son, was one of the ten peers created, all on the same day, by Queen Anne, and received the title of Lord Middleton. The care of his pupils, and of the literary concerns of their deceased parent, now interrupted Mr. Ray’s botanizing excursions, and caused him also to decline the offer of Dr. Lister, then a physician at York, to settle under his roof. Bishop Wilkins did not long survive Mr. Willughby, and his death made another chasm in the scientific and social circle of our great natural philosopher, who felt these losses as deeply and tenderly as any man. He sought consolation in a domestic attachment, fixing his choice on a young woman of good parentage, whose name was Margaret Oakley, and who resided in the family at Middleton Hall. He was married at the parish church, June 5th, 1673, being then in the forty-fifth year of his age, and his bride about twenty. This lady took a share in the early education of his pupils, as far as concerned their reading English. She is said to have been recommended by her character, as well as by her person, to the regard of her husband. She bore him three daughters who, with their mother, survived him. The first fruit of our author’s leisure and retirement was a book on a new classification of plants, published in 1682. His principles of arrangement are chiefly derived from the fruit. The regularity and irregularity of flowers, which took the lead in the system of contemporary botanists, made no part of that of Ray. It is remarkable that he adopts the ancient primary division of plants into trees, shrubs, and herbs, and that he blamed Rivinus, one of his fellow-labourers, for abolishing it, though his own prefatory remarks tend to overset that principle, as a vulgar and casual one, unworthy of a philosopher. That his system was not merely a commodious artificial aid to practical botany, but a philosophical clue to a correct natural classification, he probably, like his fellow-labourers for many years in this department, believed, yet he was too modest and too learned to think he had brought the new and arduous design to perfection. For whatever he has incidentally or deliberately thrown out respecting the value of his labours, is often marked with more diffidence on the subject of classification than any other. The great service that Ray did to botany was the foreshadowing the so-called natural system of classification, which was to supersede the artificial system of Linnæus, which will be described in a future page. He first applied his system to practical use in a general “History of Plants,” of which the first volume, a thick folio, was published in 1686, and the second in 1687. The third volume of the same work, which is supplementary, came out in 1704. This