The Historia Plantarum, for all its massive learning, did not achieve the success that it deserved. Ray himself, writing in 1689 to Lhwyd, said ‘as for cuts for my History of Plants there are none to be expected; the book sells not so well as to encourage the undertakers to be at any further charge about it. The times indeed of late have not been very propitious to the booksellers’ trade'; and Sir James Smith, writing more than a century later, declared that though ‘so ample a transcript of the practical knowledge of such a botanist cannot but be a treasure, yet it is now much neglected, few persons being learned enough to use it with facility for want of figures and a popular nomenclature’. It was in fact handicapped, as Ray had foreseen, by the lack of plates; and its bulk made it necessarily a book for the few. It is a monument to its author's greatness, and prepared the way for Linnaeus. But it could hardly do more.

For indeed it was singularly unfortunate in the time of its appearance. Ray lived and worked unmoved by the upheavals of the period: but the men to whom such a book could appeal belonged to the great world; and in Britain that world was in confusion.