INTEODUCTION. 



In the autumn o£ 1906 a suggestion was made to the Council of 

 the Linnean Society of London, that a Catalogue of the contents 

 of the Linnean Herbarium, together with a series of photographic 

 illustrations of selected types from it, would he an appropriate 

 publication for the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the 

 birth of Carl von Linne. 



Experiments showed that a fairly complete Catalogue of the 

 sheets in the herbarium in question, would extend to about three 

 volumes of the Society's Journal, and that its compilation would 

 require from fifteen to eighteen months ; the suggestion was 

 therefore found to be impossible of fulfilment, quite apart from 

 its cost. The second proposal was entertained by the Council so 

 far as preparing estimates of the cost of issuing a series of 100 

 collotype plates, the actual size of the specimens, provided one 

 hundred subscribers at a given rate were forthcoming, but as 

 only seventeen subscribers offered, that project also fell through. 



In order in some measure to meet the wishes expressed, the 

 Council sanctioned the printing of a catalogue of generic names 

 in the Linnean Herbarium in the original sequence, with the 

 number of the sheets under each, followed by an alphabetical 

 index, and preceded by an account of an enumeration by Linne 

 himself of the plants possessed by him in 1755 ; advance copies 

 were printed and distributed before the 23rd May, 1907, and 

 reissued in the ' Proceedings ' in October of that year. 



