PROCEEDINGS 



OF THE 



WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



Vol. IX, pp. 241-274. July 31, 1907. 



LINN^AN MEMORIAL ADDRESS.^ 

 By Edward L. Greene. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



The personality of Linnaeus, and his luminous career as a 

 scientific man, make a topic much too large to be presented 

 even in mere outline within the limits of an hour. If this were 

 an assemblage of botanists exclusively, still would the time be 

 too short for the worthy consideration, not only of Linnaeus as 

 a botanist in general, but of his services to any one only of the 

 several departments of the science which it is his glory greatly 

 to have advanced. But then, a botanist, a very great botanist, 

 he was also much more than that. I have a fancy — it may be 

 more and deeper than a fancy — that a great man in whatsoever 

 profession, a man of power in any branch of science, is greater 

 than the science to which he devotes himself; that he himself 

 personally is of more moment, and ought to be of deeper inter- 

 est than his science ; yes, than all the sciences that are or ever 

 shall be. 



If we could in thought divest Linnaeus of his systematic bot- 

 any and zoology, we should still find ourselves in the presence 

 of a man of the highest educational accomplishments and gen- 

 eral culture, clear-headed and original as a thinker, a philoso- 

 pher, religionist, ethnologist, evolutionist, traveller, geographer 

 and a most able and polished man of letters. There are so 



' Delivered at a joint meeting of the Washington Academy of Sciences, the 

 Biological Society of Washington and the Botanical Society of Washington, held 

 at Hubbard Memorial Hall, on the occasion of the two-hundredth anniversary 

 of the birth of Charles Linne (Carolus Linnaeus), May 23, 1907. 



Proc. Wash. Acad. Sci., July, 1907. 241 



