14 
LINN £US 
the lifeless remains of his proteHor and friend. Thus all his hopes 
weie lost but fortune soon compensated for this unmerited event. 
Lilian Stob^us, professor of physic and botany, and afterwards 
one of the physicians to the royal family of Sweden, who was then one 
of the most celebrated and eminent professors of that university, be- 
came the oracle of Lin us. The leHures of this learned man enriched 
and rendered more exaH the scientific knowledge of our young student, 
and procured him the first systematical acquirements, the principles of 
which he had began to cultivate. Among all his pupils Linnaeus dis- 
played the greatest diligence, the utmost attention to his professor, and 
a judgment in botany rare and egregious in a beginner. 
These qualities endeared him to Stobseus. He was apprised of 
and saw his indigent condition, and animated by the same generous and 
beneficent motives as Rothmann, resolved to afford him accom- 
modation free from all expence in his own family. 
In so good a situation Linn/eus found fully fostered his love of 
science, the only objeH of his desire. Here he met, for the first time, 
with a well arranged colle&ion of natural history, got acquainted with 
curiosities he had never seen before, and began to keep a regular herbal 
himself. This, though a small matter of itself, proved to him an objeH 
of great importance. It gave him an opportunity of observing plants 
more closely, of colleHing them more diligently, of examining more 
arefully their internal struflure, distmftive marks and properties, of 
giving short descriptions, and comparing them with those of Tourne- 
roRr, whom his ambition made already his pattern, and of having 
more frequent occasions to make new observations by his penetrating 
genius. T o enrich his herbal he took excursions into all the neigh- 
bouring 
