86 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



career so noteworthy for the stability of its specific characters. It made its 

 d^but in the Midsilurian era, and thence onward it survived through the 

 long ages of the Devonian and into the Carboniferous, without at any time 

 departing from the specific type. 



Anomites reticularis stands as the ideal of conservatism, the very shib- 

 boleth of heredity. Nature's ultimate expression of stability in the organic 

 world. Its life was the longest that ever fell to the lot of organic species; 

 its period beheld the rise and fall of many another race ; an endless procession 

 of creations saluted it and passed on, as we to-day, after two hundred 

 years, salute the great Swede, and pass on to join the multitude. 



John M. Clarke, Director. 



The BufEalo Society of Natural Sciences. 



The Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, in expressing its thanks to your 

 honorable Society, and its appreciation of its privilege in being permitted 

 by your courteous invitation to share in your celebration of the two hundredth 

 anniversary of the birth of Carl von Linne, desires to add its tribute of 

 praise to the memory of that great reformer in the work of natural science. 



The world must ever be grateful to Linnaeus for the wonderful knowledge, 

 born of close and accurate observation, and for the clear vision and admirable 

 judgment which enabled him to index the book of Nature, to substitute order 

 for confusion, and, by the judicious simplicity of the laws laid down by him 

 in his methods of classification, to convert, what before his time had been 

 chaotic, into the orderly ways that characterize the modern systematic 

 study of botany and biology. 



To him and to his work we turn as the starting-point for these scientific 

 studies which since his day have been so nobly developed by those who have 

 been his successors. 



Though his system may have been superseded by the philosophical 

 conclusion of other famous workers in botanical science during the past two 

 centuries, the revolution which he wrought in that great department of 

 nature study, the lucidity and simplicity of the reforms in method which he 

 first proposed, have crowned him as one of the greatest leaders known to 

 the annals of science, and as such we honor and revere his memory. 



We ask you to accept our felicitations on this interesting occasion. 



T. Guilford Smith, President. 

 Carlos E. Cummings, Secretary. 



