Letter 0538

Ray thanks Sloane for sending him a package of books, as well as ‘a pot of Dioscordium’. Ray writes that Dr Hermann’s ‘Paradisus Botarus’ has taught him a great many things that will be useful in his Supplement. Father Camelli – a Jesuit priest whose full name is Georg Joseph Kamel – has sent plant specimens from the Philippines, the account of which is very good and detailed. Ray needs the opinion of the Royal Society on the possible inclusion of the account in the Philosophical Transactions. Ray was a theologian and naturalist who collected and catalogued his botanical findings in the much lauded Historia plantarum (1686, 1688) (Scott Mandelbrote, Ray , John (16271705), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2005 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23203, accessed 18 June 2013]).