194 YORKSHIRE NATURALISTS' UNION. 



siderable fortune, and who was passionately fond of natural 

 history. He invited Dillenius to come and settle in England, 

 and in the year 1721 Dillenius accepted his invitation. Three 

 years later Dillenius brought out a third edition of ' Ray's 

 Synopsis,' but in deference to John Bull's susceptibilities it was 

 issued without his name. In 1728 Sherard died, leaving a con- 

 siderable sum of money to endow a botanical professorship at 

 Oxford, to which Dillenius was at once appointed. William 

 Sherard's brother James, who was a London apothecary, had a 

 country residence at Eltham, with a fine garden attached to it. 

 In 1732 Dillenius published his ' Hortus Elthamensis' in two 

 large volumes, containing plates and descriptions of more than 

 400 interesting plants, all drawn from the living specimens and 

 etched with his own hand. In 1736 he was visited at Oxford by 

 Linneeus, who was about thirty years his junior. His great book 

 was his ' Historia Muscorum,' published in 1741, a handsome 

 quarto with 550 pages and 85 plates, in which an enormous 

 number of mosses, lichens and algse, were for the first time 

 accurately figured and clearly characterised. In this book a 

 number of familiar names, suchas Hypnum, Bryum^ Sphagnum^ 

 and Mniuni have their origin. He died in 1747, at the age of 

 sixty. 



Dillenius had a diligent Yorkshire correspondent in Dr. 

 Richard Richardson, of Bierley, near Bradford, the discoverer 

 in our county of Trichoinanes radicans, the Irish filmy-fern, whose 

 name appears often in the ' Synopsis ' and ' Historia.' Dr. 

 Richardson was a man of wealth and position, an M.D. and 

 F.R.S., who kept up a correspondence with most of the leading 

 naturalists of his day. His letters were preserved by his relatives 

 and a selection from them was published in 1835 under the 

 editorship of Dawson Turner, and it is from this that some of 

 our best material for the personal history of the botanists of that 

 generation is obtained. After him was named the genus 

 Richardsonia in Rubiacese. He was born in 1663, and died in 

 1721. 



Trans. Y.N.U., 18S3 (pub. 1885). Series E 



