128 An Unlucky Botanist. 



than his personal misfortunes. He was born at Artois in F] 

 ders, in the year 1526. While yet a very young man he gcT 

 menced a course of travel through Portugal, Spain, Hungary* 

 England and other countries, in pursuit of plants, in those da 

 no small undertaking. Through the excessive fatigue which 

 he underwent in these journeys, he contracted, so early as i 

 his twenty-fourth year, a dropsical complaint, of which he wa! 

 afterwards cured. At the age of thirty-nine, on one of his bo- 

 tanical excursions, he had the mishap to break his right arm 

 and within a short time afterwards this calamity was followed 

 by a second, which was no less than breaking his right thigh 

 When about fifty years old, he became director of the imperial 

 Gardens at Vienna, and while there, in his fifty-fifth year, he 

 dislocated his left ankle, and about eight years afterwards', his 

 right hip. On account of the unskilful treatment of these in- 

 juries, he was ever afterwards obliged to use crutches. The 

 consequent deprivation of his usual and natural exercise, 

 brought on other diseases, among not the least distressing of 

 which, were calculus and hernia. After remaining at Vienna 

 for fourteen years, he finally returned to his native country, and 

 was appointed professor of Botany at Leyden, where he gave 

 botanical lectures for sixteen years, when he died in 1609, at 

 the age of 73, overwhelmed by the multitude of his bodily in- 

 firmities, but retaining his powers of mind unimpaired to the 

 last. In his honor was named the genus Clusia, the species of 

 which are curious and beautiful trees, belonging to the southern 

 parts of the American continent. 



