i8 INTRODUCTION 



of botany he did not choose to countenance,* " conceiving 

 Linnaeus' ' Genera ' to be written against him, but he afterwards 

 detained him a month without giving Linnaeus an hour to 

 himself the whole day long ; and at last took leave of him 

 with tears in his eyes, after having given him the choice of 

 living with him till his death, as the salary of the Professorship 

 was sufficient for them both."t Their intercourse produced 

 a mutual respect for each other's acquirements, and led to a 

 correspondence which seems to have continued to the death 

 of the Oxford Professor in 1747. After his return home 

 Linnaeus wrote, " In Anglia nullus est qui genera curet vel 

 intelligat praeterquam Dillenius," " and he founded the genus 

 Dillenia, of all plants the most distinguished for the beauty 

 of its flower and fruit, like Dillenius among botanists." J 



Dillenius had such an enthusiasm for plants that he was 

 in the habit of scattering strange seeds about in the neighbour- 

 hood of the city : some of their descendants have caused 

 surprise to later generations of botanists. So it was but 

 natural he should remove the cause of Uffenbach's reproach. 



obsolete. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Peter-in-the-East, and 

 there is a tablet to him near the south door of the church. 



An oval portrait of James Dillenius, M.D., holding an Amaryllis 

 flower in his hand, measuring 4.5 in. x 3^- in., was engraved by Jas. Heath 

 from the original painting in the Botanic Garden in Oxford. 



* Linnaeus, it is said, surprised Dillenius in company with his patron, 

 Dr. Sherard, and, having apologised in Latin for his inability to speak 

 English, threw Dillenius off his guard, who said carelessly to Sherard, 

 "This is the young man who would confound the whole of botany." 

 Linnaeus gathered the meaning of this speech by tracing the verb confound 

 to its Latin root, and he soon took an opportunity of retaliating, by 

 slightly alluding to it while he was demonstrating in the Garden some of 

 the new genera to which Dillenius had particularly objected. He quickly 

 constrained the Oxford Professor to form a high opinion of his abilities, 

 but could never succeed in making him a proselyte. There are two or 

 three variants of the story. 



t Linnaeus' Diary, 517, quoted in Druce's "Flora of Oxfordshire." 



\ Druce's " Flora of Berkshire." Also cf. his "Dillenian Herbarium," 1907. 



