LINN^US. 215 



lower jaw was bent inwards and attenuated, were 

 invariably males. On the 30th July he reached 

 the old town of Lulea, where he was detained a 

 day by a violent storm of thunder and rain ; and on 

 tlie 3d of August arrived at Torne^, which stands 

 on a small island, or rather peninsula, with a swamp 

 for its isthmus. At this place every body was talk- 

 ing of a distemper to which the cattle were subject, 

 and which attacked them principally in spring. On 

 walking to examine the meadows to which they are 

 first turned out, he found them covered with a pro- 

 fusion of the water-hemlock {Cicuta virosa), to 

 w^hich he attributed the malady. " The slightest 

 observation," he says, " teaches us that brute ani- 

 mals distinguish, by natural instinct, such plants 

 as are wholesome to them from such as are poison- 

 ous. The cattle, therefore, do not eat this hemlock 

 in summer or autumn, whence few of them perish 

 at those seasons, and such only as devour the herb 

 in question incautiously, or from an inordinate ap- 

 petite. But when they are first let out in the spring, 

 partly from their eagerness for fresh herbage, partly 

 from their long fasting and starvation, they seize 

 with avidity whatever comes within their reach. 

 The grass is then but short, and insufficient to sa- 

 tisfy them," and they eat up whatever comes in the 

 way. The proper remedy was pointed out by the 

 visiter ; and, as from 50 to 100 of their cattle pe- 

 rished annually, the matter was of great importance 

 to the inhabitants. 



In the church he saw a memorial of King Charles 

 the Eleventh's zeal for astronomical science. That 

 prince having visited Tornea, on the 14th June 

 1694 saw from the belfry the solar orb at midnight. 



