196 YORKSHIRE NATURALISTS' UNION. 



sent to the University of Lund to study medicine, but after 

 remaining there a year he removed to Upsala, where he was 

 befriended by Celsius, the professor of divinity, and Rudbeck, 

 the professor of botany, who possessed a good library of books 

 of natural history. In 1732 he made a journey into Lapland, 

 and wrote his 'Flora Lapponica.' In 1735, after taking his 

 degree^ he visited Holland, where he was befriended by Bur- 

 mann, the professor of botany at Amsterdam, and Cliffort, a 

 wealthy banker, who had a fine garden. Here he wrote his 

 'Fundamenta Botanica,' 'Genera Plantarum,' and ' Hortus 

 Cliffortianus.' Returning to Sweden he married and went into 

 practice as a physician, and became universally accepted as the 

 leading naturalist of the day. His great works of this later 

 period of his life are the ' Philosophia Botanica,' and ' Species 

 Plantarum,' the first edition of which appeared in 1753, and 

 the second in 1762. His industry and power of organisation 

 were immense, and a mass of new material kept constantly 

 pouring in for him to work upon. He invented the binomial 

 plan of nomenclature, settled the genus question on its present 

 footing, gave the names to the organs of a plant and their 

 variations which are still universally used, set the example of 

 characterising genera and species clearly and concisely, and 

 classified all known plants according to the best of all the 

 artificial systems that have ever been devised, which we know 

 by the name of the Linnean or sexual plan of arrangement. 

 He died in 1778, in the seventy-first year of his age. 



A Flora which was much used in its day, which was sub- 

 stantially a new edition of Ray's ' Synopsis ' translated into 

 English, was published in 1744, by John Wilson, who taught 

 botany, first at Kendal and afterwards at Newcastle-on-Tyne. 

 In 1762, the same year as the second edition of the 'Species 

 Plantarum ' was published, William Hudson, who was also a 

 native of Kendal, but who removed to London in early life and 

 settled there as an apothecary, published a ' Flora Anglica,' 

 in which the binomial names were used. It had a wide circula- 



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



