Among them, and perhaps the highest upon the pinnacle of fame, is that of Sir James Edward Smith, the Linnæus of our country, the concentration of whose “life and Correspondence” into two bulky volumes, evinces wondrous powers of discriminating selection, and condensation, in the biographer who has undertaken the important and onerous task. What, then, can be effected in the hasty notices of a mere rambler’s gleanings? Little more, if so much, as a bare outline of the leading features in the life of this brilliant ornament of our city and country, but enough, we trust, to lead any who have not already acquired a more intimate knowledge of his personal history, to feel earnest to repair the omission. He was a native of the parish of St. Peter’s Mancroft; and of his education, it is worthy of note, that he never left the parental roof to enter either a public or private boarding-school: he is one of the many favourable testimonies to the advantages of a strictly domestic education, conducted by aid of the most efficient masters, under the immediate superintendence of parental care. About the age of eighteen, he devoted himself to the study of botany as a science, and says himself, “the only book he could then procure was ‘Berkenhout,’ Hudson’s ‘Flora’ having become extremely scarce.” He received “Berkenhout” on the 9th of January, 1778, and on the 11th began to examine the _Ule curopæus_ (common furze), and then first comprehended the nature of systematic arrangement, little aware that, at _that instant_, the world was losing the great genius who was to be to him so important a future guide, and whose vacant place in the world of science he was destined so ably to fill. Linnæus died that night, January 11th, 1778.