In the first volume a chapter "De plantis in genere" contains an account of all the anatomical and physiological knowledge of the time regarding plants, with the recent speculations and discoveries of Caesalpinus, Grew, Malpighi and Jung; and Cuvier and Dupetit Thouars, declaring that it was this chapter which gave acceptance and authority to these authors' works, say that "the best monument that could be erected to the memory of Ray would be the republication of this part of his work separately."
Both his collegiate and editorial duties stimulated his critical powers, and the publication in the two magazines, followed by republication in book form, of a series of studies of great authors, gave him an important place as a critic. Shakespeare, Dryden, Lessing, Rousseau, Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton, Keats, Carlyle, Thoreau, Swinburne, Chaucer, Emerson, Pope, Gray - these are the principal subjects of his prose, and the range of topics indicates the catholicity of his taste.
These conventions, as well as a republication of the first Hague declaration, which had in 1907 expired by efflux of time, have been already largely ratified.
It included a republication of the British Catalogue.
Revealed religion had been declared to be nothing but a republication of the truths of natural religion (Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation), and all revelation had been objected to as impossible.
