INTRODUCTION CXXXV 



gave it very high praise, but says that he has seen it standing fairly 

 lettered and untouched on the shelves of collectors as a History of the 

 Muscovites ! Not only the true Mosses, but Hepaticae, Lycopods, and 

 some crustaceous Lichens are enumerated in this volume. The type 

 specimens are preserved at the Botanic Garden at Oxford. Hooker 

 and Arnott gave their determinations of them in Hooker's Journal of 

 Botany, vol. i. (1834). They have been examined more recently by 

 Lindberg, An edition consisting of an impression of the plates with 

 the names only was issued in 1768. On Oct. 15, 1741, Dillenius wrote 

 to Linnaeus that he had at length got rid of the burthen of his Historia 

 Muscorum, that all the plates, in number eiglity-fivo, were printed, 

 as well as sixty-one sheets of letterpress, twelve or fourteen more 

 plates remaining to be printed, and that these will be finished before 

 he can receive an answer to his letter. 



Dillenius' herbarium of flowering plants and higher Cryptogams, 

 which he prepared to illustrate his edition of the Synopsis, is among 

 the collections at Oxford. It includes many very interesting plants, 

 such as Potamogeton nitens, Hieracium sparsifolium, and H. argenteum from 

 Wales, Tolypella mucronata from Middlesex. The Berkshire plants are 

 few in number, and principally from the neighbourhood of Oxford ; 

 they are as follows : — Galium hercijnicum, Weig., G. uliginosum, L., Erio- 

 phorum latifolium, Equisetum stjlvaticum, E. palustre (1744', Parietaria (1724^ 

 Vicia sylvatica, Hyj^ericum acutum, Viola palustris, Ophrys apifera, Habenaria 

 conopsea, and Eleocharis palustris. 



Dillenius died in 1747 from an apoplectic fit at the age of sixty-three. 

 There is a three-quarter length portrait of him in the Bodleian Libi-ary, 

 given by George Seidel, M.A., in 1750, from which a print was published 

 in the Annals of Botany, and there is a likeness of him in oil in the 

 Library of the Botanic Garden at Oxford. He left to the Bodleian 

 Library a coloured copy of the Hortus Elthamensis, and another copy to 

 Dr. Lewis, his physician, which is now in the British Museum. Pie 

 left several incomplete manuscripts, among them Bay's Medicinal Plants. 



His drawings, dried plants, books, and manuscripts were pui'chased 

 by Professor Sibthorp from his executor, Dr. Seidel. Many of his 

 letters are in print, as will have been seen, in the Kichardson and 

 Linnaean Correspondence ; ' they evince,' says Dawson Turner, ' great 

 plainness of character, and he lived much esteemed by his con- 

 temporaries.' Linnaeus wrote : ' In Anglia nullus est qui genera 

 curet vel intelligat praeterquam Dillenius,' and he founded the 

 beautiful genus Dillenia in honour of him, as he states in his Critica 

 Botanica ; 'it is,' he says, 'of all plants the most distinguished for 

 the beauty of its flower and fruit, like Dillenius among botanists '.' 

 Dillenius was buried in the churchyard of St. Peter in the East in 



1 See also Pulteney's Sketches, ii. pp. 153-184. 



