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been sent you from England, and that you had decorated 

 your walls with them at Hammarby. She has drawn the 

 plants for the illustrated edition of the " Species Plan- 

 tarum," many of them finely, with her own hand, and 

 had them engraved, each plate costing four louis-d'or. 

 The number of the plates will amount to 10,000. She 

 examines every plate with the most scrupulous attention, 

 and corrects the slightest fault or blemish ; she after- 

 wards paints the plants in lively colours ' (colours them 

 like life). She sent Linne" one of the plates, represent- 

 ing a veronica, by way of specimen. ' She will be glad 

 if it meets with your approbation,' adds Bjornstahl. 

 No more than 138 plates of the Margravine's work were 

 finished, and these were never published. 1 



Schultz, the Hamburg mineralogist, visited Linne 

 in 1775 by the Prince Royal's request (then just newly 

 king), and showed him the extraordinary opal called 

 Oculis mundi, which Linne had described (unseen) from 

 Wallerius's mineralogy, of which two specimens hitherto 

 had been seen in the British Museum and there only. He 

 also showed him the rainbow-coloured agate, the bril- 

 liancy of whose colours surpass the most beautiful gems 

 of the East. Enraptured with admiration at the beauty 

 of this stone, Linne began in a strain of enthusiastic lan- 

 guage to expatiate on the magnificence and grandeur of 

 the Creator, and how Nature best proclaims a God. An 

 account by Schultz of his visit on October 25, 1775, to 

 Linne at Upsala is interesting : f The younger Linne was 

 1 She died in 1783, aged thirty-two. 



