I. 



The Museum Ludovicse Ulricse. 



The middle of the eighteentli century may be said to 

 mark an epoch in the life of Linn.eus. Duiing the years that 

 had elapsed since John Frederic Gronovius, in Leyden 1735, 

 when returnino- the first visit of the vouno- foreiirner then 

 fresh from the north, was shown the manuscript of the Sy- 

 stema Naturse, and struck with admiration, conjointly with »a 

 learned Scotchman Isaac Lawson», iindertook its publication, 

 the author had devoted all his energies to the development 

 of the germs that »conspectus» coniprehended. In several 

 works of great importance he had already laid the foundations 

 of systematic botany, had explored the principal parts of his 

 native land, had given it a Flora and a Fauna, and, while 

 attending in an exemplary manner to professorial diities which 

 embraced a väst field of learning and research, lectures followed 

 with intense interest, excursions and demonstrations, discourses 

 and dictations, the outcomes of which have been brought 

 down to US in numerous academical dissertations, had formed 

 a school of gifted and zealous naturalists such as the world 

 has rarely seen before or since. And now the most signi- 

 ficant period of his life had arrived. That Nature's System 

 of which in early manhood, when yet on the threshoid of 

 Science, he had sketched the outlines, and which had since 

 appeared in two editions, revised and enlarged though kept 

 within the primitive plan, now demanded to come forth as 

 the great achievement of his life, in an »editio rcformata», 

 erabraciug every species known whithin the three Kingdoms 

 of Nature. The plants, his first love, claimed the first of his 

 efforts, and he again applied all his powers to the Species 

 Plantarum, which in 1748 he had begun and brought a long 



