688 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
acquisition of this, at that time the universal language of the edu- 
cated. The Swede or Finlander even, if a college man, might visit 
every country of Europe, and converse with the men of the colleges 
and universities everywhere, without learning one of the modern 
languages. Linneus even, two generations this side of the epoch 
of his great uncles, the Tilianders, did this. Now, among this aristo- 
cratic caste of the learned, in medizval times and later, it was almost 
the universal custom with men of lowly origin to drop the ancestral 
family name and assume a Latin one. It was a fashion of the time; 
and, as I have said, the time lasted through many centuries. When 
Latin was the language of a certain social caste and the language of 
almost all authorship, the canons of good taste seemed to require 
that the author of a book in Latin should put his name in Latin 
on the title-page, and not in some barbaric Teutonian or Russian 
or Scandinavian or English form, to which, as to a plebeian in- 
heritance, he might chance to have been born. Such is the origin 
of the general circumstance, familar to all botanists, that nearly 
all the thousands of volumes of botanical literature that antedate the 
beginning of the nineteenth century are by authors whose names are 
plainly Latin names. The same is true of the earlier literature of all 
our sciences. It was all in Latin, and the authors’ names are Latin 
names. 
The greatest name in astronomy, but for the man’s Latinization of 
it on the title-page of his immortal book, would have come down to 
posterity as Kupernik. But all astronomers and all other people 
besides should be grateful that, the book being in Latin, he wrote 
himself not Kupernik but Copernicus. The most illustrious of old- 
time Chinese sages was and is known to his countrymen as Kung-fu- 
tsee; but the Latin scholars who, some centuries ago, first brought 
him to the notice of the western world wisely and tastefully Latinized 
Kung-fu-tsee to Confucius. A single generation earlier than Lin- 
neus there flourished in Germany one of the greatest botanical 
celebrities which that country has produced. His splendid folios are 
now so rare that only the choicest botanical libraries of to-day are 
able to catalogue a set of them, and they were very helpful to the 
young Linneus. This famous German, as a boy, and before his col- 
lege days rejoiced in the plain everyday Teutonian name of August 
Bachman. Afterwards, as professor of botany at Leipzig and the 
author of immortal books of botany in Latin, he assumed the most 
perfect counterfeit of an ancient classic Latin personal name which 
IT can recall. This August Bachman is known in history and to fame 
as Augustus Quirinus Rivinus. The name Rivinus was arrived at in 
the simplest kind of a way, for it is nothing but Bachman—the man 
who dwells by a rivulet or brook—translated into Latin. Now just 
as Rivinus—in German Bachman—recalls a stream bank where the 
