7 8 LINN^US IN HOLLAND. 
Boerhaave, who was then sixty-seven years old, received him with 
gladness, and took him into his garden for the purpose of judging of 
his knowledge. 
He showed him as a rarity the Crategus Aria , and asked if he had 
ever seen that tree before, as it had never been described by any bo- 
tanist. Linn as us answered that he had frequently met with it in 
Sweden, and that it had also been already described by Vaillant. 
Struck with the young man’s reply, Boerhaave denied the latter part 
of his assertion, with so much more confidence as he had published 
himself that work of Vaillants ( Botanicon Parisiense, Lugd. Batav. 
1727, fol.) with notes of his own, and firmly believed that tree had 
not been described in it. To remove all doubts, and to give all pos- 
sible sanction to what he advanced, Boerhaave immediately fetched 
the work itself from his library — and to his extreme surprise found 
the tree fully described in it, with all its distinctive marks. Admiring 
the exaCt and enlarged knowledge of Linnaeus in botany, in which he 
seemed even to excel himself, the venerable old man advised him to 
remain in Holland , to make a fortune which could not escape his talents. 
Linn^us answered that he would fain follow this advice, but his in- 
digence prevented him from staying any longer, and obliged him to 
s- out the next day for Amsterdam , on his return to Sweden. He 
took his leave of Boerhaave, and this visit unexpectedly became the 
source of his fortune, of his eminence, and of that botanical reform 
which the frowns of fate, and the cares of providing for his daily 
subsistence, had not thus far permitted him to accomplish. 
What the Italian poet Metastasio says, respecting the happiness or 
misfortunes of man, and the vicissitudes of destiny by which the greatest 
enterprises 
