8b 



©tHBinal Articles. 



ELIAS FEIES. 



Fries was born at the parsonage of Femsjo, in a wooded 

 country, in Smaland, in the southern i^art of Sweden, on the 16th 

 of August, 1794. He became at an early age a student at the 

 University of Lund, and graduated Philosophic Magister at the age 

 of twenty, was api^ointed Bocens in 1814, Junior Professor 

 ('' Adjunkt ") in 1819, and received the title of Professor in 1834. 

 Later in the same year he was appointed ordinary Professor of 

 Practical Economy at the University of Upsala, and in 1851 

 became Professor of Botany there, succeeding Wahlenberg ; in 

 1859 he retired and received a pension. It would be vain endea- 

 vouring to ennumerate all the marks of distuiction he received. 

 He was a member of so many learned societies, Swedish and 

 foreign, that neither himself nor any one else remembered 

 them all.* 



The pursuers of science had, since the death of Linne, almost 

 exclusively worked at those branches with which the great master 

 had most occupied himself, and neglected those to which he had 

 given less attention. This was the case with the Lichens, and 

 especially with the Fungi. No one had had the courage to try to 

 arrange the Fungi; it seemed a.^ though the words of Linne, calling 

 them "a pack of rovers, robbing what Flora leaves when she 

 retu'es into her winter quarters," had alienated his disciples' 

 minds from the wish to make their acquaintance. Thus Fries 

 entered an almost unbeaten track, and he followed the study of 

 these plants with such energy and success that his labours are the 

 basis upon which all later workers must ever build. This being 

 his greatest merit, we will give a more particular account of his 

 mycological studies. 



Fries was already in his earlier years well acquainted with the 

 realm of Flora. Lacking in his childhood the company of brothers 

 and sisters, and of playmates belonging to his own class of society, 

 his father had brought him out into nature that he might feel this 

 want less, and that the children of Flora might be to him in the 

 place of friends — " friends who did not afterwards desert him, but 

 were always true," as he says hiniself in one of his writings. At 

 the age of twelve he knew many of the plants growing m his part 

 of the country. It was when accompanying his mother gathering 

 strawberries in 1806 that his attention was attracted by the large and 

 pecuhar Hydnum coralloides, and it was this discovery, he tells us, 



* So long ago as 1835 Fries was elected a Foreign member of the Linnean 

 Society of London, and iji 1875 he received the distinction of a similar honour 

 from the Koyal Society. [Ed. Journ. Bot.} 



N. S. VOL. 8. [J-'E^l^UAKY, 1879.] F 



