LINN^AN MEMORIAL ADDRESS 245 



the time lasted through many centuries. When Latin was 

 the language of a certain social caste, and the language of 

 almost all authorship, the canons of good taste seemed to require 

 that the author of a book in Latin, should put his name in Latin 

 on the title page ; and not in some barbaric Teutonian or Rus- 

 sian or Scandinavian or English form to which, as to a plebeian 

 inheritance, he might chance to have been born. Such is the 

 origin of the general circumstance, familiar to all botanists, that 

 nearly all the thousands of volumes of botanical literature that 

 antedate the beginning of the nineteenth century, are by authors 

 whose names are plainly Latin names. The same is true of 

 the earlier literature of all our sciences. It was all in Latin ; 

 and the author's names are Latin names. 



The greatest name in astronomy, but for the man's Latiniza- 

 tion of it on the title page of his immortal book, would have 

 come down to posterity as Kupernik. But all astronomers, and 

 all other people besides should be grateful that, the book being 

 in Latin, he wrote himself not Kupernik but Copernicus. The 

 most illustrious of old-time Chinese sages was and is known 

 to his countrymen as Kung-fu-tsee ; but the Latin scholars 

 who, some centuries ago, first brought him to the notice of 

 the western world, wisely and tastefully Latinized Kung-fu- 

 tsee to Confucius. A single generation earlier than Linnaeus 

 there flourished in Germany one of the greatest botanical celeb- 

 rities which that country has produced. His splendid folios 

 are now so rare that only the choicest botanical libraries of 

 today are able to catalogue a set of them ; and they were 

 very helpful to the young Linnaeus. This famous German, as a 

 boy, and before his college days, rejoiced in the plain everyday 

 Teutonian name of August Bachman. Afterwards as professor 

 of botany at Leipzig, and the author of immortal books of botany 

 in Latin, he assumed the most perfect counterfeit of an ancient 

 classic Latin personal name which I can recall. This August 

 Bachman is known in history and to fame as Augustus Quirinus 

 Rivinus. The name Rivinus was arrived at in the simplest kind 

 of a way ; for it is nothing but Bachman — the man who dwells 

 by a rivulet or brook — translated into Latin. Now just as Rivinus 

 — in German Bachman — recalls a stream-bank where the Bach- 



