LINNEZ AN ADDRESS—GREENE. 693 
Tournefort as a botanist, never measured half the latter’s success as an 
immediate and popular influence. Viewed without bias or prejudice, 
and in the perspective of two centuries, Tournefort’s Institutes be- 
comes the most conspicuous landmark in the whole history of botany. 
By no other one author’s help did the science make a stride in advance 
equal to that made under Tournefort’s influence between the years 
1694 and 1730. It is important that these things be taken note of here. 
On the day when Linneus was born two hundred years ago, Tourne- 
fort’s dazzling star was high on the botanical horizon. It was at its 
meridian when, at 18 years of age, Linnzeus fell under the benign in- 
fluence of Doctor Rothman at Wexi6. This man made no pretensions 
to botany, beyond what any first-class practicing physician of that 
period had to know; but he had full knowledge of the great fame of 
the Parisian, Tournefort, and had in his library the German Profes- 
sor Valentini’s “ abridgment of Tournefort’s Elements. Doctor Roth- 
man had evidently studied Tournefort and been fascinated with his 
system. Linneus, the youth, away in the distant north, the pupil of 
none but theologians, had not so much as heard of Tournefort. Roth- 
man told him frankly that all his recreations with plants were little 
better than wasted time unless he should begin to recognize them as 
interrelated by characters of their flowers, as Tournefort had taught. 
From the day when Doctor Rothman placed in his hands Valen- 
tini’s key to the twenty-two Tournefortian classes of plants, the 
young Linnzus bent his energies in botany to ascertaining by’ their 
organographic marks to what one of the classes of Tournefort each 
plant that he found belonged. It was a day that completely and 
most happily revolutionized this brilliant youth’s conception of the 
plant world, as well as his method of investigating it. It was, in 
fact, the day when Linneus, according to his own testimony about it, 
first began to be a botanist; and thenceforward the illustrious Pari- 
sian had never a more zealous disciple, until after some years the 
ardent disciple began, and in some respects deservingly, to supersede 
the master. It is hardly to the praise of Linneus that in after life, 
when at the height of his own resplendent fame he was dedi cating a 
genus of plants to each of his chief benefactors of earlier days, he for- 
got good Doctor Rothman. This man had been the first, and perhaps 
the most important of them all, even from the view-point of botanical 
training. It was certainly he who, as far as one can see, saved the boy 
Linneus from oblivion when his own father had resolved to appren- 
{ice him to a cabinetmaker or a tailor. It was he who, having as- 
sumed, as it were, sponsorship for Linneus as candidate for a career 
in science, placed in his hands the first book of real botany that the 
@Valentini (Michael Bernhard), professor in Giessen. 'Tournefortius Con- 
tractus, Frankfurt am Main. 1715, folio, pp. 48, 4 tab. 
