[buller] presidential ADDRESS 11 



gardens at Florence. He soon obtained a number of new plants from 

 the more flourishing garden of Pisa, and with the co-operation of his 

 friends, a Botanical Society was founded at Florence in the year 1717. 

 In 1729, when he was fifty years old he published the results of his 

 scientific observations in a great work which was printed in his native 

 city. The cost of the plates which numbered one hundred and eight, 

 was defrayed by a large number of patrons interested in natural history.^ 

 Among them were Hans Sloane who was then President of 

 the Royal Society, William Sherard, the Oxford botanist, and several 

 other Englishmen. The work is usually referred to as the Nova 

 Plantarum Genera, but translated from the Latin its full title is New 

 genera of plants, arranged after the method of Tournefort, in which 

 1900 plants are enumerated, of which almost 1400 have not before been 

 observed, while others are referred to their proper places; about 550 of 

 these which it seemed advisable to illustrate, have been represented on 108 

 copper plates; with additional notes and observations regarding the 

 planting, origin, and growth of fungi, mucors, and allied plants. It 

 is a fine quarto volume with excellent plates which, in many copies 

 that have come down to us, look almost as fresh as when they were 

 issued. In order to collect new plants, Micheli was commissioned to 

 travel in Northern Italy. In 1736, he visited the famous Mount 

 Baldus and the Venetian Isles. Unfortunately he was attacked by 

 pleurisy from the consequences of which he never recovered. He 

 returned to Florence where he died in 1737 in the fifty-eighth year of 

 his age. He was buried in the Church of Sante Croce where lie the 

 ashes of some of the greatest men of Italy and of all time, — of Michael 

 Angelo, Galileo, Dante, Machiavelli, and Alfieri. Well may the people 

 of Tuscany be proud of their great forerunners. On the tablet erected 

 to Micheli's memory there is a Latin inscription which translated reads 

 as follows : 



"Pier' Antonio Micheli lived 57 years and 22 days, happy although 

 in moderate circumstances, an expert in natural history, a leading 

 botanist of Tuscany, well-known everywhere for his researches and 

 writings, and much beloved by all the worthy men of his age on account 

 of his wisdom, sweetness of disposition, and modesty. He died on the 

 second of January, 1737. His friends gathered contributions and 

 erected this tablet." 



Micheli was never married. His contemporaries describe him as 

 a man of the most pleasing, modest, and liberal manners, no less ready 

 to communicate than eager to acquire knowledge. He had good health 

 until his last illness when, as one of his biographers relates, "he placidly 



^ At the beginning of his work Micheli gives a list of 197 patrons. 



