Dissertatio de Ricino

In 18th- and 19th-century Europe, it was standard practice for university professors to write their students' dissertations; the student's job was to explicate and defend the thesis. At the University of Uppsala (Sweden), first Linnaeus and then Thunberg wrote hundreds of these botanical papers, usually focused on taxonomic and systematic matters — either describing and naming genera and species or analyzing basic issues of classification. The Cullman Library holds dozens of these small, individually published papers, many of them housed in old acidic pamphlet-binders. This particular example is focused on the castor oil plant (ricin).