THE LINDEN-TREE OF LINNHULT 25 



with questions about the name, qualities, and nature of 

 every plant he met with ; but though his memory was 

 good, and later became remarkably so from its constant 

 exercise with attention, childlike he forgot the names 

 of the plants and the result of all his questions. These 

 things require to be impressed on children's memory 

 by constant repetition, line upon line, like the nursery 

 rhymes and other lore they learn. His father refused 

 to tell him more until he showed with the curiosity a de- 

 termination to remember. Indeed, it was a long lesson 

 to learn the names of all the plants in the home garden ; 

 for Linnaeus in a letter to Baron Hal ler says it con- 

 tained more than four hundred species, many of them 

 rare and exotic. 1 His father was his tutor in other things 

 besides natural history. He taught Carl Latin, religion, 

 and geography, i to qualify him for the pulpit and to 

 conduct his botanical studies more skilfully,' until he 

 was seven years old, when he was placed under the 

 care of John Tiliander, a relative, who, I suppose, came 

 to stay with the family, or came, perhaps, as curate. 2 

 He was in no way fitted to be tutor of an intelligent, 

 vivacious, and peculiar child, the child of the young 

 century, John having in teaching but one idea of his 

 own an idea already antiquated: that of obstinate 

 severity an idea impossible to maintain at a time when 



1 ' To this early discipline Linnasus afterwards ascribed his tena- 

 cious memory, which, added to his sharpness of sight, laid the 

 foundations of his eminence as a reforming naturalist.' JACKSON. 



2 Linnaeus marks the date Sept. 15, 1714. 



