ABSTRACT
The middle of the eighteenth century was a period of great activity in the study of plants and animals. The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus was publishing a vast number of new names for living organisms, while his students at Uppsala University became so enthused by his lectures that they set out for distant lands in order to collect more specimens. After leaving Paris, Bruce went to Italy, where he gave some seeds to the botanical garden in Florence. Plants of the famous cereal that was known to the Ethiopians as teff were raised there, and a dissertation on the subject was published by A. Zuccagni in 1775. Bruce’s seeds of Phytolacca dodecandra were also sown in Versailles and the plants were described and so named by L’Héritier in 1791, but it is surprising that no herbarium specimen can be traced in the Paris collections.
