148 LINNtEUS at STOCKHOLM. 



proved equally propitious to his name and to the state of the sciences 

 in Sweden. The corporate scientific bodies under royal authority and 

 protection had only been instituted the preceding year at London and 

 Paris. The most modern of the capitals in the north of Europe, St. 

 Petersburg!!, was the first, which, under the auspices of Peter the 

 Great, obtained in the year 1724 the distinguished and earliest ho- 

 nour of such a corporate literary body. Ljnn^eus, by soliciting a 

 similar establishment at Stockholm, now strove to attain the same merit 

 and honour which Leibnitz and Haller had acquired by the insti- 

 tution of the academies at Berlin and Goettingen. He was well ac- 

 quainted with the learned at Stockhohn, and with those grandees 

 who loved the sciences. A general scientific zeal gave birth to the 

 idea of raising a learned corporation. The most aftive promoter of 

 this plan was a young man of noble birth and great parts, Count A. G. 

 HoEPKEN, who held afterwards the dignity of counsellor of state and 

 chancellor of the university of Upsal, with distinguished merit, and 

 died on the 9th of May 1789, in the fiftieth year of the existence of 

 the academy of Stockholm, and in its first jubilee *. The society which 

 in the beginning only consisted of six members, held their first meeting 

 on the second of June 1739 — and Linn^us had the honour of being 

 elefted president. None could have been worthier of that distinftion 

 than himself; none of the members had so well deserved of any one 

 science, and gained such early celebrity as he. The fixed period for the 

 duration of the presidency was limited by the statutes to three months 

 only. LiNNvEUS resigned his charge on the third of Oftober, and 

 made on that occasion a speech in his mother tongue, on the remarka- 



* Count GvLDENSTOLPE is now his successor. 



1 bles 



