BICENTENARY OF LINNJEUS 89 



It is, in fact, scarcely possible to overestimate the influence his work and 

 personality had in shaping the future of botany and zoology; and coming 

 generations of biologists will continue to rejoice, as we now do, that he laid 

 the foundations of their science so deep and so broad. 



The vocabulary of superlatives to praise his genius has long since been 

 exhausted; but we who daily and hourly profit by the laws he enunciated 

 may well pause in our work to exult because, two hundred years ago, Sweden 

 gave to the v.^orld a light that will continue to shed luster upon her name so 

 long as the biological sciences exist. 



Leonhard Stejneger, President. 

 Wilfred H. Osgood, Secretary. 



The Indiana Academy of Sciences, Indianapolis, Ind. 



The criterion by which a man's greatness is judged is his work. If this 

 gains recognition from his contemporaries, he is successful; if his name 

 lives to be honored by succeeding generations, his career has been more than 

 successful, he has achieved fame ; but, if he leaves behind him some piece of 

 work or the record of some discovery from which his successors reckon time, 

 his is a distinction which comes to few men, and to which none dare aspire. 

 Such is the record of Linnaeus. He was a recognized leader among his 

 contemporaries; his co-ordination of the chaos which then existed in the 

 natural sciences gave him fame ; and the successful application of the bino- 

 mial system of nomenclature to animals and plants made his works the point 

 from which the taxonomist measures time. Nor is the homage the expression 

 of the whim of a group of hero-worshipers. To-day the system of Linnseus 

 is discarded by taxonomists, and much of his work is forgotten; but as long 

 as systematic botany and zoology have their devotees among men of science, 

 so long will his name be remembered and his fame endure as the one who 

 first brought the binomial system of nomenclature into general use. 



Guy West Wilson, for the Academy. 



The Colorado Scientific Society, Denver, Colo. 



The Colorado Scientific Society, the oldest and largest scientific associa- 

 tion of the Rocky Mountain region, sends greeting to its elder sister in the 

 metropolis of America, and extends congratulations on the successful com- 

 pletion of the memorial in honor of the world's greatest botanist. How 

 great must be the power of the savant whose influence can extend over 



