692 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
Now, while making himself the despair of his tutors in Hebrew and 
theology, what had the young Linnzus been accomplishing all these 
years? The idler which these thought him he had not been. In 
mathematics and physics he was quite distinguished; moreover, his 
student comrades called him always the little botanist, thus by chance 
conveying the information that, as a youth of 18 years, Linnzus was 
small of stature, and as much as possible given to botanizing. He has 
told us himself that, during all his years at Wexi0, the red-letter days 
were those of his occasional walks across the country 30 miles to the 
home at Stenbrohult, which gave opportunity to study the wild plants 
of the waysides. He had also acquired certain books on botany— 
Swedish local floras—in the study of which he had busied himself 
day and night until he almost knew them by heart, as-he assures us. 
The titles of at least three of those books, and especially their au- 
thors’ names, must needs be given on a Linnean bicentenary that is 
celebrated in America. The fitness of this mention you shall see. 
One of the books was Rudbeck’s Hortus Upsaliensis (1658) ; another 
was Tillandsius’s Flora Abeensis (1673) ; the third Bromelius’s Chloris 
Gothica (1694). It was to the grateful memory of these Scandi- 
navian botanists, Rudbeckius, Tillandsius, and Bromelius, all of them 
dead before Linneeus was born, that he, in the days of his own fame, 
consecrated those fine American genera, Rudbechia, Tillandsia, and 
Bromelia. These men, by their books, had been his teachers of botany 
while he dwelt at Wexi6 between the eleventh year of his age and the 
nineteenth. It is true that the works of these men were not of the 
nature of what would now be called scientific botany; that is, the 
plants discussed were not arranged according to any notion of their 
affinities. The order followed was either that of the alphabetic 
order of their names, as in a common dictionary, or else, if they were 
grouped at all, the grouping was according to their medicinal prop- 
erties or other economic uses. All these books, so much beloved and 
revered by the youthful Linnzus, had been published before Tourne- 
fort, who, practically, and at least for the time immediately ante- 
cedent to Linneeus, was the father of natural system in botany. 
It was as an inmate of Doctor Rothman’s household, and while 
preparing under his direction to enter some university as a candidate 
for the doctorate in medicine, that a new day dawned upon Linnus’s 
horizon in respect to his botanical recreations and pursuits. The 
botanical system of Tournefort had now been before the public for 
some thirty years. His work was the most complete and signal suc- 
cess that ever had been, and I may almost say, that ever yet has been, 
in the field of botanical authorship, because it seems to have capti- 
vated the whole botanical world without arousing a jealous enemy or 
eliciting a line of adverse criticism for twenty years, save only a mild 
protest from the gentle John Ray in England, who, clearly superior to 
