Lawson—Thure Kumlien. 
665 
panionship with his revered master, that Mr. Kumlien has been, while at 
Uusala, a very special favorite among the botanical pupils of Professor 
Elias Fries ( 6 ). How thoroughly worthy the youth must have been, of the 
particular attention of the great Swedish botanist of the nineteenth cen¬ 
tury, was still manifest in Mr. Kumlien when I first made his acquaint¬ 
ance, some sixteen or eighteen years after his arrival in this country. 
He was then a sort of a second and American edition of jFries, in his 
almost equal familiarity with each of the following departments of bot¬ 
anical study; phanerogams, ferns and their allies, mosses, lichens, and 
fungi. He had, in 1860, and I know not how long before, so well mastered 
the extensive and varied flora of southern Wisconsin that there was no 
indigenous tree or shrub, flower, grass, or sedge, or moss, or hepatic, 
lichen, or mushroom, the scientific name of which was not at his tongue’s 
end for you at any moment. I am confident that, notwithstanding our 
considerable list of worthy names in American botany, no state in our 
union has ever had so complete a master of its whole flora as Wisconsin 
had in this extraordinary man, whom our eastern botanists seldom heard 
anything of; whom, with his low stature, muscular frame, rather stoop¬ 
ing shoulders, light hair and keen blue eyes, a stranger might have mis¬ 
taken as he passed along the country roads for an ordinary farmer from 
the Scandinavian settlement; who, in the most polished society would 
have been recognized as an intelligent, refined and almost courtly gentle¬ 
man; in whom any scholar would have found a finished collegian of 
the old Swedish school; whose pen could indite Ciceronian Katin and 
whose tongue could address a foreigner in, I believe, any one of the 
languages of Europe spoken between Spain and (Sweden. But that which 
makes his thorough familiarity with so many branches of botany seem 
more remarkable, more unmistakably indicative of uncommon natural 
gifts, is the fact that, even from boyhood, his specialty appears to have 
been ornithology. It was to the birds, yet not so as to exclude other 
branches of zoological study, with which he was also vary familiar, that 
he gave most of his time. On his vacation tours in college days, he had 
penetrated to some of the remoter parts of the Scandinavian peninsula, 
and had visited the islands of the Baltic; and, although he gave us charm¬ 
ing word pictures of the flora of those more secluded places, it was 
plain that what had pleased him most had been the new gains thus made 
in the knowledge of his particular favorites, the birds. Even the fame, 
which he could not seek, but which was thrust upon him at last, in no 
small measure, was that of an ornithologist. It was with reference to its 
probable facilities for ornithological work, that, under the guidance of a 
map only, and from afar, he made choice of the locality in Wisconsin 
where he would build his cottage and consecrate his home”( 4 ). 
Although his full baptismal name was Thure Ludwig Theodor 
Kumlien, he always signed himself with the first name, Thure. 
He was born at Hertorp in Harlunda parish, Skara stift (district), 
Skaraborg lan (county), Vest ergo tland, Sweden, on November 9, 
