278 THE JOURNAL OP BOTANY 



elaborated and critical study of the Corsican flora, for which the 

 term "Prodromus" seems scarcely adequate. Synonymy and the 

 distribution of the species, subspecies, and varieties have been 

 carefully worked out, and critical notes are frequent. It is to be 

 hoped that nothing will occur to hinder the completion of the 

 work, which should form a valuable addition to the literature on 

 the botany of the Mediterranean region. A "R T? 



Bref och skrifvelser af och till Carl von Linne ; med widerstod 

 af Svenska Staten utgipia af Upsala Universitet. Forsta 

 Afdelningen. Del v. Stockholm (Aktiebolaget Ljus), 1911, 

 pp. 366. 



The issue of this important series continues to progress 

 steadily ; our notice of the previous volume will be found in this 

 Journal for November, 1910, pp. 290-293. That volume was 

 entirely devoted to the correspondence between Linne and his 

 most intimate friend, Archiater Back ; in the fifth volume, now 

 before us, we have the conclusion of that interchange of letters 

 from 1756 till 1776. 



The same unstudied familiarity is found in these later letters 

 as those which went before them. We have such cases as where 

 Linne laments the death of his skilful gardener, Dietrich Nietzel, 

 with his extreme anxiety to get a good man in his place, lest the 

 value of the academic garden should be lessened or lost. He 

 chats about many things uppermost in his mind at the time of 

 writing, such as the career of Hasselquist and the fate of his 

 collections, his delight in getting Patrick Browne's plants, and his 

 surprise that the English should have allowed so great a treasure 

 to escape them, at so small a cost. The estates of Hammarby 

 and Safja are bought, he himself has had the Upsala fever, he 

 narrates the symptoms of approaching sickness, also the forma- 

 tion of a Siberian garden at Hammarby, as those plants will stand 

 the winter's cold (a garden still existing and glorious- in May with 

 the yellow flowers of Gorydalis nobilis), his delight at being 

 painted by Eoslin for nothing, a plan of his museumon the little 

 height behind his house which shows how he there arranged his 

 treasures, and the pathetic last letter of all, written on December 

 5th, 1776, on the death of Back's sole surviving son, but which 

 did not reach Back till the writer was dead himself. 



Two-thirds of the volume are taken up "with these freely- 

 written notes, and the remainder of the pages contains the corre- 

 spondence from those friends whose names begin with the letters 

 C or D, such as Celsius, both Anders and Olof, friends and bene- 

 factors of Linne during his student life, the entomologists Clerck 

 and De Geer, and Dalin the historian. We have also a memo- 

 randum to Count Gustaf Cronhjelm, the Chancellor, undated and 

 unsigned, but attributed by the editor to the spring of 1733, 

 which recounts not only his early writings, but his plans for even 

 the Species Pktntarum, which was not accomplished till twenty 

 years later. 



