John Ray’s Cambridge Catalogue (1660)

Second Hand
Hardcover
Author: Oswald, P.H. & Preston, C.D. (eds.); Ray, John
Published by: Ray Society

Book Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket: Very Good.
Overall fairly crisp, clean and bright; just some light marks to the boards and a little light creasing and a few light marks to the prelims. DJ is a little bumped. Previous owner has left some things loosely inserted, including notes and a map of the High Tatra mountains in Slovakia.
John Ray is the outstanding British natural historian of the 17th century. This 624-page book far surpasses Ewen & Prime’s (1975) Ray’s Flora of Cambridgeshire By providing the first complete translation from the Latin of his first publication, A catalogue of plants growing around Cambridge (1660).This is famous as the first British County Flora, but it is a much more complex work than its title suggests. It includes not only a botanical catalogue, but also “for the benefit of beginners” indexes of English names and of places (with lists of the rarer species of 12 areas in the county) and hitherto untranslated chapters on the meanings of plant names and of botanical terms. Ray’s abilities as an all-round naturalist are apparent from the numerous digressions in the text, which include pioneer observations on insect parasitoids and the hermaphrodite mating of slugs and snails and a suggestion that gardeners may control plant pests by fostering “a great army of frogs”. The rare appendices to the Catalogue, published in 1663 and 1685, are also translated here for the first time.
ISBN: 9780903874434