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Dr. Otto Kuntze died suddenly at San Remo, Italy, on January 

 28. He was in his sixty-fourth year, having been born in Leip- 

 sic, June 23, 1843. Dr. Kuntze was a pharmacist in early man- 

 hood and is said to have acquired a comfortable fortune by the 

 age of thirty through the manufacture of ethereal oils. Mean- 

 while, he had developed much interest in systematic botany and 

 as early as 1867 published a " Taschen-FIora von Leipzig." In 

 1874-76, he made a journey around the world for botanical 

 observation and collecting, and on his return studied in Leipsic 

 and Berlin and in 1878 received the degree of doctor of philos- 

 ophy from the University of Freiburg, his dissertation being a 

 " Monographic der Gattung Cinchona L." He afterwards pub- 

 lished an account of his journey, a monograph of the genus 

 Clematis, and a revision of the genus Sargassuui. Subsequently 

 he made other extensive botanical journeys, the two most impor- 

 tant being to South America in 1891 -'92 and to southern and 

 eastern Africa in 1894. In determining the plants collected on 

 these expeditions, Kuntze became impressed with the wide diver- 

 sities of usage in the matter of plant-nomenclature and took strong 

 ground in favor of the priority principle, embodying his views in 

 his " Revisio Generum Plantarum," which appeared in three 

 volumes in 1 891 -'98. This work, which involved a vast amount 

 of bibliographical research, was based on the so-called " Paris 

 Code" of 1867, to which, by certain amendments, he attempted 

 to give more definiteness and precision. Kuntze's " Revisio " 

 and his numerous subsidiary papers on nomenclatural questions 

 have had a wide influence with botanical systematists, though not 

 wholly in the direction intended or anticipated by their author. 

 His intolerance of opposing views and his imperfect command of 

 some of the foreign languages in which his polemics weie pub- 

 lished, contributed to his peculiar distinction in the botanical 

 world, but detracted somewhat from the serious consideration to 

 which his opinions were entitled. Dr. Kuntze had been for sev- 

 eral years on the active membership list of the Torrey Botanical 

 Club. His last visit to the United States was in the summer of 

 1904- 



