This was by no means the end of the controversy, which broke out again and again until it was laid to rest, whether finally or otherwise it would be unwise to predict, by the experiments of Pasteur.
The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries each possessed at least one naturalist of wide learning and untiring diligence, who made it his care to collect information concerning all branches of natural history, to improve system, and to train new workers. Gesner, Ray, and Linnæus occupied in succession this honourable position.
Ray was originally a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who had risen into notice by proficiency in academical studies. He then became inspired by the hope of enlarging the knowledge of plants and animals, and of producing what we should now call a descriptive fauna and flora of Great Britain. His plan contemplated close personal observation, travels at home and abroad, and the co-operation of pupils and friends.
[Illustration: JOHN RAY. From an old engraving of the portrait by Faithorn.]
His chief assistant was Francis Willughby, a young man of wealth and good family; while Martin Lister, a Cambridge fellow, who had already laboured at natural history with good effect, undertook an independent share in the work. Ray wisely began with what lay close at hand, and published a catalogue of the plants growing around Cambridge. This was not a mere list of species, but a note-book charged with the results of much observation and reading. Journeys in quest of fresh material were begun. Then Ray's well-laid scheme was disconcerted by calamities which would have overwhelmed a less resolute man. He was driven from Cambridge by the Act of Uniformity, and forced to serve for years as a tutor in private families. When this servitude came to an end his only livelihood was a small pension, bequeathed to him by Willughby, on which he lived in rustic solitude. Willughby was cut off at the age of thirty-six, having accumulated much information but completed nothing. Lister became a fashionable physician, to whom natural history was little more than an elegant diversion. The whole burden of the enterprise fell upon Ray, who manfully bore it to the end. He completed his own share of the work, prepared for the press the imperfect manuscripts of Willughby, and before he died was able to fulfil the pledge which he had given forty years before in the prosperity of early manhood. It is needless to say that the natural history of Britain, executed in great part by a poor and isolated student, fell far short of what Ray might at one time have reasonably expected to accomplish.