24 LINNvEUS 



that Sweden is the Atlantis of Plato, the Paradise of Adam, and the 

 native country of the ancient northern and southern nations, including 

 the Greeks and Romans. 



Olaus Rudbeck, the son of the former, born on the 15th of 

 March 1660, who had taken his degrees at Utrecht, succeeded his fa- 

 ther in his academical funftions. During the first years he made botany 

 his chief pursuit. He afterwards applied to philology, in which he 

 made great progress, and intended to publish a great philological 

 work, intituled Lexicon Harmonicum, when death arrested his career 

 on the 23d of March 1740. When he first took Linn^us under his 

 proteftion, he had attained his seventieth year. Going out and 

 giving leftures became equally difficult for him, and he wished for an 

 assistant. In point of botany he could have found none more able than 

 LiNNyEus. The perusal of his treatise, and a nearer trial of his abili- 

 ties, determined Ola'us to fix his choice upon him. 



He took Linnaeus into his house, where he gave ledures for him 

 in the botanical garden in the year 1730. It did great honour to a 

 young student only twenty-three years of age, to become the re- 

 presentative of a venerable academical institutor. He supplied his 

 place with every mark of approbation. The vivacity of his instruc- 

 tions, the novelty of matter, charmed his audience, and this charge, ad 

 interim, became to the young lefturer a fresh incentive to improve- 

 ment, and a school of his own cultivation. He stood indebted to the 

 venerable old man under whose roof he was placed, for a more exten- 

 sive knowledge of ornithology ; he had a coUeflion of all the Swedish 

 birds, and gave leftures on them. Linn^us always continued to 



make 



