62 BOTANICAL INFORMATION. 
Schleiden’s ‘ Principles of Scientific Botany,’ may still be consulted as 
a faithful mirror of the science as it then existed. 
Professor Link devoted considerable time and attention to the 
description of new species of plants, most of which he published in 
a continuation of Willdenow’s ‘ Species Plantarum.’ In conjunction 
with Count Hoffmansegg, he commenced a Flora of Portugal, and he 
also published a memoir on the plants of Greece. Link contributed 
several valuable papers on physiological botany to the Transactions of 
the Natural History Society of Berlin; but he has done more service 
for vegetable physiology in his annual reports than in any other of his 
writings. They comprise a summary of all that had been published in 
. botany during the year, accompanied with many valuable remarks and 
sound criticisms of his own. In these reports he had to defend him- 
self and others from the heavy artillery directed against them by 
Schleiden, who, whilst claiming for himself a large margin for liberty 
of opinion, is most unscrupulous and pertinaciously offensive towards 
those who differ from him. In these literary contests, however, Link 
showed that the experience of above fifty years had not been lost upon 
him, and he was not unfrequently more than a match for the vigour 
and logie of his youthful and more precipitate adversary. He has now 
gone to his grave, and we doubt not that his talented antagonist will 
_ be the first to raise a monument to his memory. Whatever regret may 
be felt at Berlin for his decease, or whoever may succeed him in his 
Chair and Directorship, the name of Link will always be honourably 
associated with the progress of botany in the nineteenth century. 
_ Every scientific man may strive with advantage to imitate him in his 
unwearied industry, in his tolerance of views opposed to his own, and 
. in his willingness to undertake any task, however humble, by which he 
. might advance the interests of the science to which he had devoted 
. his happily prolonged life. : s 
LINNEAN Socrery.—W. Yarrell, Esq., V.P., in the chair. Mr. 
. Gould exhibited a drawing, the size of life, of a new and very 
_ extraordinary bird, belonging to a genus and species entirely new, 
. and which he had called Baleniceps Rex. It is an inhabitant of the 
. interior of South Africa, and has the head and bill of a pelican, and 
. the feet and legs of a crane. It stands four feet in height, and its 
- principal food consists of young alligators. The bill is not so large, 
