24 THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINN.&US 



of steps leading to the entrance door. One might well 

 walk into the canals as poor Artedi did ; it was difficult 

 to avoid such risk at night, in his time, when doubtless 

 Dutch streets were insufficiently lighted. The Rhine 

 flows through the city in branches, each like a canal, 

 and a canal flows round the city in zigzags like a fortifi- 

 cation, forming a moat of defence. 



The university occupies a whole quarter of the 

 town the Quartier Latin of Leyden ' The Prince of 

 Orange, with the view of rewarding the citizens of Ley- 

 den for the bravery they displayed at the time of the 

 siege, gave them the choice of two privileges either an 

 exemption from certain taxes, or a university ; they chose 

 the latter, and the town became the Athens of the West/ 



Beyond St. Pieter's Kerk, with the two quaint towers 

 at its western end, are laboratories and academic build- 

 ings of all sorts, chemical laboratory, and famous ana- 

 tomical museum, &c., interspersed with slow gliding 

 branches of the Rhine, and pretty gardens, into which 

 one peeps through gratings. Here is a labyrinth of 

 bridges, toegangs, and verboden toegangs (a toegang is 

 not precisely translated by the word footpath, as one 

 might suppose ; it is a thoroughfare or entrance). But 

 one need not lose oneself, for St. Pieter's Kerk is only 

 divided by a short street, and of course a bridge, from 

 the famous Hall of Science, that Niebuhr thought the 

 most venerable in the world ; where also Linnaeus's 

 system was first publicly adopted, which doubled the in- 

 terest with which I looked at its arched and pillared hall. 



