NOTICES OF BOOKS. 317 



salutation in Sweden. The little girls and young women always 

 dip a curtsey to every one in the company ; even the youngest boys 

 never omit to take off their hats separately to each person. ' I was 

 struck when I first saw her,' writes Linnaeus to his friend Haller, 

 ' and felt my heart assailed by new sensations and anxieties. 

 Nature is nature wherever you find it,' whether in the land of 

 Borneo or Linnaeus. Elizabeth, too, seems at once to have felt the 

 strange power of eyes made to discover truth ; and here was a truth 

 entirely new to him — that the charm of a beautiful maiden is the 

 most exquisite thing in the world. He who had counselled the 

 young men, his companions, to keep their heads free of love — 

 was science all-sufficient for him now?" But we must stop, 

 and refer our readers to the work to read the graphic account of 

 the stormy course of true love in the conduct of the stern father, 

 the hard terms, and so on. Mrs. Caddy has certainly made 

 a most readable book. The incidents of her journeyings and the 

 events of Inst century are sometimes curiously interwoven, but, as 

 becomes the authoress of such a work, she is devoted to her hero, 

 and she makes him live to her readers. 



Mr. Alberg's volume derives its chief value from his being able 

 to incorporate in it and to give for the first time in English dress 

 some of the results of the Linnean studies of the lamented Ahrling. 

 Mr. Alberg's style is somewhat flowery, and he writes English as 

 if it were his mother-tongue. As a specimen of the work, the 

 paragraph narrating the birth of Linnaeus may entertain our 

 readers: — "At last spring returned, and what joy did it bring to 

 her yearning heart ; for not only is spring in Sweden the most 

 beautiful season of the year, when nature in a few days wakes from 

 wintry sleep from under the snowy cover, and the soil gratefully 

 absorbs the remaining snow to fertilize the earth, whole masses of 

 ice, dissolving into water, hasten away in merry little rills, as if 

 afraid of being hid in the earth, and rush to swell the tributaries of 

 the many rivers, which all make for the cool, clear sea ; and when 

 every twig and pond is covered with eager-budding leaflets, kissed 

 to life by spring, and inquisitive to look abroad — at this delightful 

 season, when all nature rejoices at the spring-time of our existence, 

 'just when the cuckoo with mystic notes heralded the advent of the 

 floral season,' the curate and his young wife, on the 13th of May. 

 the old Gregorian style, anno 1707, were supremely blest by the 

 seasonable advent of a young cherub, for to them was that day born 

 a son and heir, and alighting upon earth, as he did, in the joyous, 

 verdant spring, in such a happy floral home, it seemed as if the 

 pretty little flowers of the curate's garden had enticed him there 

 from the first to become their playmate, and subsequently to become 

 their most ardent lover." 



Mr. Alberg is equally fluent in dealing with his own English 

 and Ahrling's Swedish, but when he prints Latin words or quotations, 

 and specially when he tries to translate from the Latin, he is 

 singularly unfortunate, and a Greek word which he tries to reproduce 

 presents a hopeless stumbling-block : no one would recognize 

 Bauhin's niNA- in "Bauhinus's K.I. U.A.E." On one opening of 



