32 JOURNEY TO LAPLAND. 



desert state of those regions. Linn^us did not travel through cul- 

 tivated fields, but through a country whose surface is deeply covered 

 with snow during the greatest part of the year, containing a few solitary 

 huts, abodes of the greatest poverty, but contentment, whose ten- 

 ants have no notion of superfluity, nor of many wants; in short, 

 through a country where the human race is still in a rough, unculti- 

 vated state. The manners of the inhabitants with whose language he 

 soon got acquainted, their hospitality and good-nature which he praised, 

 the diseases which he found among them, and their modes of cure, 

 ceconomy, &c. became the objeSl of our traveller's attention. 



The same northern distriQs through which LinnjEus was now travel- 

 ling, were visited four years after by that celebrated society of Southern 

 astronomers and philosophers who ascertained the figure of the earth, 

 and glorified Sir. Isaac Newton in his grave. This great man had 

 maintained in the last century by an ingenious theory, that the earth 

 was flat and pressed inwards about the poles. The great Italian astro- 

 nomer Cassini, whom the liberality of Louis XIV. brought to 

 Paris from Bologna, by several mensurations attempted to refute 

 Newton's hypothesis. To decide this contest, this learned expedi- 

 tion was undertaken at Paris, through the endeavours of Count 

 Maurepas, an expedition which will ever be memorable in the annals 

 of literature. 



CoND amine was dispatched from Pans to Peru with another so- 

 ciety, to measure there the degrees beneath the equator, and Mau- 

 PERTius, OuTHiER, Clairaut, Camus, and Mounier, repaired 

 to Tornea in Lapland, whither they were accompanied from Ujf- 

 sal by Andrew Celsius, the Swedish astronomer. The result of 



both 



