The twelve years which Ray spent at Trinity after securing his fellowship were a period of profound importance for the intellectual life of Britain. Macaulay, summarising the condition of England in 1685, declared that ‘the English genius was effecting in science a revolution which will to the end of time be reckoned among the highest achievements of the human intellect…the civil troubles had stimulated the faculties of the educated classes and had called forth a restless activity and an insatiable curiosity…the torrent which had been dammed up in one channel rushed violently into another’. The suggestion that England was a pioneer in this field is not of course correct: in Italy, France, Germany and the Low Countries scientific studies had been attracting attention for at least a century. But Green's record—‘From the vexed problems, religious and political, with which it had so long wrestled in vain, England turned at last to the physical world around it…and its method of research by observation, comparison and experiment, transformed the older methods of enquiry in matters without its pale’—emphasises more judiciously the same characteristic of the period.