ELIAS MAGNUS FRIES.! 
Ex1as Maenus Friss died at Upsal on February 8, in 
the eighty-fourth year of his age, five months after the cele- 
bration, in which he was able to take some part, of the four 
hundredtk anniversary of the foundation of that university, 
and a month after the hundredth anniversary of the death of 
Linneus. Born, as was Linneus, in Smoland, 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 Linnzeus’s successors, except for the 
fact that he did not occupy the chair of Linnzus ; for when, 
more than forty years ago, Fries, then demonstrator of bot- 
any 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 botanical professor. 
Fries’s earliest work, the first part of his Novitiz, appeared 
in the year 1814, when the author was only twenty years old. 
His st of any moment, a new edition of his ‘“ Hymenomy- 
cetes Europzi,” was published on his eighty-first birthday, 
August 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 the highest 
character of its kind. In Phenogamous botany, it related 
chiefly to the Scandinavian flora, in which for critical judg- 
ment he had no superior; in Mycology, of which he was the 
reformator and to a good degree in Lichenology, he had no 
rival except as regards microscopical research. The modern 
microscope did not exist when he began his work, and, while 
showing how much can be done without it, he may too long 
1 Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science, xiii. 453. 
(1878.) 
