700 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
rities who had taught there, was hardly second to Paris itself with 
its traditions of Tournefort and his successor, Vaillant. In Prof. 
Paul Hermann’s time, little more than a generation anterior to Lin- 
neeus, the Leyden Garden had been confessedly the finest and richest 
in the world. After Paul Hermann, Dr. Hermann Boerhaave had 
presided there. He had retired from the professorship three years 
before Linneeus’s arrival in Holland, and was now at once the most 
famous physician in Europe and without a rival as an authority upon 
systematic botany. He was living in age and retirement not far from 
Leyden, and there was not another man upon the face of the earth 
whom Linneus so much wished to see. He could not endure the 
thought of returning to Sweden without having visited this great 
Mecca of botanists, Leyden. Once there, he found friends in learned 
botanists nearer his own age, who had not yet published books, and 
of whom he had not heard, among these, Adrian van Royen, professor 
at the university in succession to the illustrious Boerhaave, also Doc- 
tor Gronovius, a well-versed and ardent botanist. Others at Leyden 
who became Linneus’s cordial and helpful friends we must not stop 
to name. Both van Royen and Gronovius became enthusiastic over 
the young man and his manuscripts. Gronovius was so charmed with 
his Systema Nature that he proposed, with Linneus’s permission, 
to have it published at once, and the printing of it was begun. It 
came out, as a mere outline sketch of a new natural history. It was 
a folio tract of but fourteen pages, but it was everywhere received 
with the greatest applause. Meanwhile Linneus had used every 
endeavor to see that great oracle of medicine and of botany, old Boer- 
haave, but in vain. Provided with a letter from Gronovius, he had 
called every day for a whole week, but to no purpose. Ambassadors 
and princes had found him accessible with some difficulty. Even 
Peter the Great, of Russia, had been obliged to wait two hours in an 
anteroom, to take his turn in getting a conference with this busiest 
and most imperious old prince of learning and master of the healing 
art. Linneus now bethought himself to send a copy of the new 
Systema Nature. A letter came back, naming the day and the hour 
when he should be admitted to an audience. The interview was pro- 
longed and was carried into Boerhaave’s own private botanic garden, 
a place well stocked with almost all plants and trees that had been 
found to endure the climate of Leyden. One beautiful tree which 
Boerhaave thought—was even very certain—had never been described, 
Linneus gave him the name for; also the volume and page of one of 
Vaillant’s folios in which it was described fully and clearly. When 
they returned to the library the place was found, and the truth was 
admitted. The venerable doctor advised the young Swede to settle 
in Holland, where he felt certain that his learning and talents would 
insure him wealth and great renown. But since Linneus could not 
