122 THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINN.EUS 



it with the highest approbation, and expressed a wish 

 to be better acquainted with the author. 



This small treatise, replete with new and luminous 

 observations, delighted Professor Rudbeck; he was 

 struck with the young author's spirit of observation 

 and the solidity and novelty of his knowledge. Old 

 Rudbeck was not altogether one of those professors 

 ' miserable creatures lost in statistics ' ; he loved a theory 

 dearly. He wrote paradoxes by the score, and a thick 

 book of hypotheses to prove that all Europe was civi- 

 lised from Sweden. 



i We'll verify his words, eh, Artedi ? ' l said Linnasus. 

 The young men used good-humouredly to laugh at the 

 good old theorist. ' Rarely has such a variety of profound 

 and extensive learning been united as in Rudbeck,' 

 writes Linnasus. * But he maintains the strangest and 

 most unbounded paradoxes. He pretends that Sweden 

 was the abode of the ancient Pagan deities and of our 

 first parents ; the terrestrial paradise, the true Atlantis 

 of Plato ; and that it was the origin of the English, the 

 Danes, the Greeks, the Romans, and all the rest of the 

 world/ 



Linnaeus was brought forward to dispute upon his 



1 The view now gaining ground is that the Aryans originated 

 in Europe, say in North Germany or Sweden, that the Sanskrit- 

 speaking conquerors of the Land of the Five Rivers were, in fact, 

 the Eurasians of their time. Mr. Saporta's notion is that the human 

 race originated within the Arctic circle at a time when most of the 

 surface of the globe was too hot to be inhabited by man. Hibbert 

 Lecture, May 1886. 



