LINNEZAN ADDRESS—GREENRB. 701 
now prolong his stay at Leyden, Boerhaave desired him to take a 
letter from himself to his friend, Professor Burmann, at Amsterdam, 
the port whence Linneus had proposed to sail for Sweden. He found 
Burmann, then much engaged upon his Botany of Ceylon,’ so over- 
whelmed with work of several kinds that courtesy seemed to require 
that he should make the call short. It was evident that nothing but 
the letter from that great scientific potentate, Boerhaave, at Leyden, 
had procured him admission to Burmann’s presence. On withdraw- 
ing, however, he was invited to call again. At the second call he 
found the Amsterdam professor less preoccupied. ‘They went into 
the botanic garden. At the end of this interview Burmann was over- 
whelmed with a sense of the unexampled skill of this young Swede 
in botany.’ He had learned so much of him in that one hour as to 
see that he must secure, if possible, his help in the finishing of his 
great book of Ceylonese botany. Linnus was invited to take up his 
abode with Burmann for the period of his sojourn in Amsterdam, 
and he accepted the bidding. He had been there about two months 
when he received a call from one of the merchant princes of Amster- 
dam, George Cliffort. He was a gentleman of culture as well as of 
great wealth, and had a very noble garden and conservatories abound- 
ing in rare plants from the Indies and other remote places. But his 
errand with Linneus was not botanical. He was something of an 
invalid, and melancholy. His regular physician was Boerhaave, at 
Leyden. On a late visit to him, Boerhaave had advised him that his 
ailments were chiefly resultant from his princely ways of living; that 
he could not do better than employ the services of a brilliant young 
Swedish physician, a specialist in dietetics, at present the guest of 
Professor Burmann. He advised him to take Doctor Linneus for 
body physician into his own house, and place himself under his direc- 
tion as to diet. This was Cliffort’s motive in calling upon Linneus. 
The outcome of it was an agreement between them; and the young 
physician botanist was soon quite luxuriously domiciled with Cliffort, 
and under good pay. Charmed with the Cliffortian garden and con- 
servatories, and seeing there many a plant unknown to botanists, 
Linneus counseled the preparation and publication of an illustrated 
folio, that might fitly be entitled the Hortus Cliffortianus, in which 
the rarities and novelties growing there should be brought to the 
knowledge of the world botanical. Of course the proposition 
delighted Cliffort and the work was done. That most luxurious of 
all Linneeus’s works, the Hortus Cliffortianus, he assures us, was writ- 
ten in nine months. It was published in Amsterdam in 1737, when 
Linneus was 30 years old. But besides this, there had already been 
published, since Linnzeus had come to Amsterdam, the Bibliotheca 
a@Thesaurus Zeylanicus. 4to. Svs 
