148 
LINNAEUS 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 
proteftion had only been instituted the preceding year at London and 
Paris. The most modern of the capitals in the north of Europe , St. 
Petersburg h, was the first, which, under the auspices of Peter ths 
Great, obtained in the year 1724 the distinguished and earliest ho- 
nour of such a corporate literary body. Linnaeus, 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 Stockholm , 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. 
Ho epken, 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 distinction 
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. Linnjeus resigned his charge on the third of OCtober, and' 
made on that occasion a speech in his mother tongue, on the remarka- 
* Count Gyldenstolpe is now his successor. 
bles 
