THE 



EDINBURGH NEW 



PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNAL, 



Biographical Memoir of the late Christian Smith, M. D. 

 Naturalist to the Congo Expedition. By Baron Leopold 

 Von Buch. 



VyHRisTiAN Smith, son of a wealthy proprietor in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Dram in Norway, was born on the 17th October 

 1785. Under the prudent management of his father, his talents 

 were early unfolded ; and in his fourteenth year, he was sent to 

 the school at Kongsberg, which enjoyed a well-merited repu- 

 tation. Here he made such progress in his knowledge of the 

 ancient languages, that, in a short time, he wrote Latin with 

 almost as much facility as his mother-tongue. As early as 1801, 

 his father sent him to Copenhagen, where the celebrated Vahl, 

 soon finding what a proficient might be made of him, became 

 his counsellor and friend, and detennined him to devote himself 

 exclusively to the study of Botany. The knowledge of Mosses 

 and Lichens, so abundant in his native country, had especially 

 attracted his attention, to which he was the more fully deter- 

 mined, by the discovery of some plants, till then unknown, in 

 the neighbourhood of his native city, which were given to the 

 world in the Flora Danica. Not all the advantage he enjoyed 

 for acquiring practical knowledge as a physician, in the ma- 

 nagement, from the year 1804, of the Frederick's Hospital in 



JULY— OCTOBER 1826. O 



