ELIAS MAGNUS FRIES. 1 



Elias Magnus Fries died at Upsal on February 8, in 

 the eighty-fourth year of his age, five months after the cele- 

 bration, in which he was able to take some part, of the four 

 hundredth anniversary of the foundation of that university, 

 and a month after the hundredth anniversary of the death of 

 Linnaeus. Born, as was Linnaeus, in Smoland, a southern 

 province of Sweden, and like him called in middle age to the 

 renowned Scandinavian university, he might be regarded as 

 the most distinguished of Linnaeus's successors, except for the 

 fact that he did not occupy the chair of Linnaeus ; for when, 

 more than forty years ago, Fries, then demonstrator of bot- 

 any at Lund, was called to Upsal, Wahlenberg was in the 

 botanical chair, and Fries was made professor of practical 

 economy. His son, however, by the retirement of Areschoug, 

 is now botanical professor. 



Fries's earliest work, the first part of his Novitiae, appeared 

 in the year 1814, when the author was only twenty years old. 

 His last of any moment, a new edition of his " Hymenomy- 

 cetes Europaei," was published on his eighty-first birthday, 

 August 15, 1874. Most of the sixty intervening years are 

 marked by some publication from his busy and careful hand. 

 His work was wholly in systematic botany, and of the highest 

 character of its kind. In Phaenogamous botany, it related 

 chiefly to the Scandinavian flora, in which for critical judg- 

 ment he had no superior ; in Mycology, of which he was the 

 reformator and to a good degree in Lichenology, he had no 

 rival except as regards microscopical research. The modern 

 microscope did not exist when he began his work, and, while 

 showing how much can be done without it, he may too long 



1 Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science, xiii. 453. 

 (1878.) 



