EHRHART AND THE ‘ SUPPLEMENTUM PLANTARUM ’ 
149 
continues: “ Do you know what you wrote to Du Roi P [then follows 
the passage translated by Smith]. I look on it as pardoned.” 
To his translation of the letter, Smith (/. c.) appends a note: 
“ The sheet alluded to was cancelled; but the editor \_i. e., Smith] 
was favoured by Ehrhart with an impression. The discarded genera, 
with their characters, are published in this author’s Beitrage , vol. i. 
174”—under the title “ Meine Beitrage zum Linneischen Supple- 
mento Plantarum.” As has already been indicated, this, though 
dated 1781, was not published until 1787. Linnaeus’s direction as to 
the cancellation of the sheet was carried out: the “ interval in the 
paging,” anticipated by him but regarded as “of no consequence,” 
has been obviated by the insertion (pp. 71-78) of an unnecessary and 
indeed useless (for the pages, are not indicated) “Index Specierum ” 
in which is recorded the number of species assigned to each genus in 
the succeeding pages (79-456) of the work; the paging of the 
volume is thus rendered continuous. The letter from Ehrhart to 
Smith which accompanied the cancelled sheet is preserved in Smith’s 
correspondence: it is dated April 11, 1793, and runs: “Mitto Tibi, 
Vir clarissime, Plagulam desideratum Supplementi Plantarum Lin- 
naeani, cum nonnullis Plantis cryptogamiis Hannoveranis, quas Te 
benigne excipias oro rogoque ” ; the sheet itself does not seem to 
have been kept. Dr. Jackson tells me that the Society possesses 
many long letters (1778-83) from Ehrhart to Linnaeus which pro¬ 
bably contain matter that would interest any who have time and 
patience to decipher the script. 
The dissertation to which Linnaeus refers in his letter is Methodus 
Muscorum illustrata , “ proponit Olaf Swartz in auditorio Gustaviano 
Majori ad diem xiv. April 1781, Upsaliae apud Joh. Edman,” re¬ 
printed in Aincen. Acad. x. (1790) and in Act. Medic. Suecic. i. 
(1783). 
It may he noted that Smith (in Rees, s.v. “Linnaeus”) later 
(1812?) expressed himself adversely to the action of Linn. fil. in 
suppressing the sheet, at the same time paying a tribute to Ehrhart’s 
knowledge of mosses as being in advance of his time; referring to 
the Supplement-urn he says : “ the ingenious editor inserted his own 
new characters of some genera of Mosses ; which Hedwig has since 
confirmed, except that some of the names have been justly rejected. 
This sheet was, in an evil hour, suppressed by the mandate of 
Linnaeus, from London, where at that period, the subject of generic 
characters of mosses was neither studied nor understood, whatever 
superior knowledge was displayed concerning their species.” The 
genera which Linnaeus suppressed were indeed so well founded that 
when S. O. Lindberg revised the nomenclature of mosses he adopted 
practically all of them, though this in some cases involved the sup¬ 
pression of names which had been commonly in use since Hedwig’s 
time ; British bryologists have been made familiar with this resusci¬ 
tation through Braithwaite’s British Moss Flora. Ehrhart’s acute¬ 
ness of observation in days when microscopes were primitive has been 
generally acknowledged ; the remarks of C. E. Thedenius (Observ. 
Scand. spec. Andreaeae (Stockholm, 1849, p. 5), may he cited as an 
instance of this. He points out that prior to 1778 little attention 
