ELIAS MAGNUS FRIES. 453 



culture, a pursuit he steadily continued for nearly seventy years. 

 After studying medicine at Yale College and in Philadelphia, and 

 after some years of practice in Connecticut, he moved to Ohio, where 

 he spent the remainder of his Jong life. While busily following his 

 calling of physician, he found time for a great deal of other work. 

 During a quarter of a centur}', he was professor of medicine. In 1848, 

 he worked up the natural history of Ohio, as part of the geological 

 survey of that State. Not the least valuable portion was an account 

 of the fishes, which was published, with plates, in the " Journal of the 

 Boston Society of Natural History," and which still stands as a work 

 of authority. He wrote also valuable papers on sexualism among the 

 naiades. The growing of fruit he pursued during his whole life, and 

 was very successful, especially in producing new varieties of cherries. 

 It is scarcely necessary to add that in this respect he was a public 

 benefactor. 



Such a man is always interesting. The peculiarities which make 

 him what he is, and the native energy and originality which have held 

 him up, give a certain freshness of character rarely found among men 

 of strictly academic training. 



ELIAS MAGNUS FRIES. 



Elias Magnus Fries died at Upsal on February 8, in the eighty- 

 fourth year of his age, five months after the celebration, in which lie 

 was able to take some part, of the four hundredth anniversary of the 

 foundation of that University, and a month after the hundredth anni- 

 versary of the death of Linngeus. Born, as was Linnteus, in Smo- 

 land, a southern province of Sweden, and like him called in middle 

 age to the renowned Scandinavian University, he might be regarded 

 as the most distinguished of Linnteus's successors, except for the fact 

 that he did not occupy the chair of Linnieus ; for when, ifaore than 

 forty years ago. Fries, then Demonstrator of Botany at Lund, was 

 called to Upsal, Wahlenberg was in the botanical chair, and Fries 

 was made professor of Practical Economy. His son, however, by 

 the retirement of Areschoug, is now the botanical professor. 



Fries's earliest work, the first part of his Novitiae, appeared in the 

 year 1814, when the author was only twenty years old. His last of 

 any moment, a new edition of his Hymenomycetes Europsei, was 

 published on his eighty-first birthday, Aug. 15, 1874. Most of the 

 sixty intervening years are marked by some publication from his busy 

 and careful hand. His work was wholly in systematic botany, and of 



