840 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



sonages with whom he had come in contact furnished him an in- 

 exhaustible fund of interesting reminiscences. Strange to say, 

 considering his German extraction, he was devoid of any appre- 

 ciation for music. He spoke and wrote in English, German, 

 French, and Latin, and was also acquainted with Greek. 



A notable feature of his scientific work was its systematic 

 character. Evidence of this is furnished by the synoptical tables 

 attached to his several monographs, and by the fact that the ana- 

 lytical table of the Carices was one of his productions. The 

 cryptogams had for him an attraction that they do not have for 

 many. We owe most of our knowledge of this series of plants to 

 German, Danish, and Swedish investigators. Knowledge that 

 may not be read by him who runs but must be delved for, as is 

 the case with that relating to the fungi and their near allies, 

 seems to have an especial attraction for Northern minds. 



Among his well-deserved honors was the naming after him of 

 Schweinitzia odorata (sweet pinesap), by Stephen Elliott. This 

 is a small plant, found from Maryland southward, and bears a 

 spike of flesh-colored flowers which exhale the odor of violets. 



A general characterization of the botanist's work can not be 

 given better than in the following words of Walter R. Johnson : 



" When we consider the extreme difficulty of the particular 

 departments of botany to which Mr. Schweinitz devoted his chief 

 attention, the prodigious number of facts which he has accumu- 

 lated, the vast amount of minute and delicate investigation de- 

 manded by the nature of the objects of his study, the labor of 

 preparing for the press the materials which he had brought to- 

 gether ; when we recollect that, with the exception of Dr. Muhlen- 

 burg, of Lancaster, no American botanist had ventured far upon 

 this wide and unexplored dominion of Nature, and when we re- 

 member that this science was his relaxation, not his profession 

 his occasional pursuit, not his daily duty we are forcibly struck 

 with the high order of his talents for the pursuit of physical sci- 

 ence, and can not but regret that more of his time and energies 

 could not have been devoted to this favorite ocupation." 



Von Schweinitz bequeathed his collection of plants to the 

 Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. It comprised 

 twenty-three thousand species of phanerogams and many thousand 

 cryptogams. A large portion of the specimens were from the 

 most remote parts of the world, having been obtained by exchange 

 with American and European explorers. They included the 

 " Baldwin collection " from Florida, Brazil, and La Plata, which 

 von Schweinitz had bought, and in which he had found three 

 thousand species not before in his herbarium. The examination 

 and arrangement of these plants had been one of his last scientific 

 labors. 



