250 GREENE 



guished ; moreover, his student comrades called him always the 

 little botanist ; thus by chance conveying the information that, 

 as a youth of eighteen years, Linnaeus was small of stature, and 

 as much as possible given to botanizing. He has told us him- 

 self that, during all his 3'ears at Wexio, the red-letter da3's were 

 those of his occasional walks across the country 30 miles to 

 the home at Stenbrohult, which gave opportunity to study the 

 wild plants of the waysides. He had also acquired certain books 

 on botany — Swedish local floras — in the study of which he had 

 busied himself day and night until he almost knew^ them by 

 heart, as he assures us. The titles of at least three of those 

 books, and especially their authors' names, must needs be given 

 on a Linnaen bicentenary that is celebrated in America. The 

 fitness of this mention you shall see. One of the books was 

 Rudbeck's Horttis Upsaltensis (1658) ; another was Tillandsius' 

 Flora Abocnsis (1673) 5 the third Bromelius' Chloris Gothica 

 (1694). It was to the grateful memory of these Scandinavian bot- 

 anists, Rudbeckius, Tillandsius and Bromelius, all of them dead 

 before Linnjeus was born, that he, in the days of his own fame, 

 consecrated those fine American genera, Rtidhechia^ Tillandsia 

 and Bromelta. These men, by their books, had been his 

 teachers of botany while he dwelt at Wexio between the eleventh 

 year of his age and the nineteenth. It is true that the works of 

 these men were not of the nature of what would now be called 

 scientific botan}^ ; that is, the plants discussed were not arranged 

 according to any notion of their affinities. The order followed 

 was either that of the alphabetic order of their names, as in a 

 common dictionary, or else, if they were grouped at all, the 

 grouping was according to their medicinal properties or other 

 economic uses. All these books, so much beloved and revered 

 by the youthful Linnaeus, had been published before Tourne- 

 fort, who, practically, and at least for the time immediately ante- 

 cedent to Linnaeus, was the father of natural system in botany. 

 It was as an inmate of Dr. Rothman's household, and while 

 preparing under his direction to enter some university as a can- 

 didate for the doctorate in medicine, that a new day dawned 

 upon Linnjeus's horizon in respect to his botanical recreations 

 and pursuits. The botanical system of Tournefort had now 



