OF THE LIFE OF LINNyEUS. 209 



offer made to him from Madrid^ was soon after realized at Stockholm. On 

 tlie 4th of April, 1757, he received a diploma, which raised him to the 

 rank of the hereditary nobility of the kingdom, and he forthwith called 

 himself De Linn^us. Thus, from the humble condition of the son 

 of a village preacher, he rose as high in rank and dignity, as the em- 

 pire of the muses could possibly exalt him*. 



When the new observatory was consecrated at Stockholm, the Aulic 

 Councellor Baron Hoepken, expressed himself in a speech, which he 

 made before the King on the 20th of September 1753, in the Aca- 

 demy of Sciences, in the following words : — " Botany, during the 

 longest period of its existence has been a fanciful and voluntary struc- 

 sure of memory, till it received certain foundations and distinflive 

 charafters of a man in Sweden., whose name i would mention, 



WERE IT NOT KNOWN TO THE LEARNED WORLD, AND AS IMMOR.- 

 TAL AS THE SCIENCE ITSELF. 



LiNN^us reaped many other honours and rewards of his knowledge 

 and merit, exclusive of those which have already been enumerated. 

 In 1754 he wrote a treatise on the cultivation of the Alps of Lapland f. 

 He demonstrated, how that ridge of mountains, which laid in a waste 

 and wild state, and contained hardly an hundred species of plants, could 

 be turned to great advantage, by the introduftion of foreign trees and 

 alpine plants, suitable to their climate and soil. He communicated this 

 treatise to the academy of sciences of Stockholm. Count Sparre had 



• In the letters patent of knighthood Linn^us makes the 2044 families of inferior 

 nobility then in Sivedcn, 



f De plantis, quae Alpium Suecicarum indigenas, magno rei ccconomicae et medicae emo- 

 Iiimento fieri possint;— Sec transaftions of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences of 1755, 

 vol. V. 



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