MEMOIR OF LIXN.EUS. 63 



moration of his peculiar tastes even at that age, a 

 corner of his father's garden hore the name of 

 Charles*. It was this love for his favourite occu- 

 pation, the resistless attraction of fields and mea- 

 dows, that must account for the slowness of his 

 progress at school, and also for the charge of inca- 

 pacity brought against him by one of his teachers, 

 Lanarius (whose name Cuvier has taken care to 

 preserve), who would have extinguished this me- 

 teor of natural science, by counselling his father to 

 bind him an apprentice to some obscure profession, 

 a shoemaker, or, according to others, a tailor, 

 or a carpenter, from a belief that Providence had 

 not endowed him with sufficient aptitude for a 

 liberal education. 



The struggles and hardships he was doomed to 

 encounter in his youth, had no effect in damping 

 his ardour or slackening his application. It often 

 happens that poverty, instead of disheartening or 

 overwhelming genius, only developes and fortifies 

 it the more ; and when we read of the future Pliny 

 of the North receiving at college the alms of the 

 charitable, wearing the cast-off clothes of his com- 



* It is recorded of the mother of Linnaeus, that when she 

 perceived the bent of his mind so contrary to the studies for 

 the church, to which he was originally destined, she expressly 

 forbade her other son, Samuel, from ever entering his father's 

 garden, being persuaded that he would there contract those 

 tastes and habits that had defeated her fond hopes of making 

 Charles a clergyman. 



