192 
REMARKABLE OCCURRENCES 
other, and thus gradually spread its poison in his hands and other limbs. 
Those who attended him began to despair of his recovery. All his 
appetite being gone, he one day took it into his head to refresh himself 
with strawberries ; he ate them, fell asleep, desired more of that fruit to 
be given him, and two days after rose from his bed entirely restored to 
health and vigor. In the course of the following summer he was again 
troubled with a relapse. He came to the palace, with a pale and dis- 
torted countenance. The Queen Dowager asked him if he wanted any 
thing. — “ A pottle of strawberries” — answered he. The strawberries 
were brought him; — and the next day her Majesty saw him full of 
spirits and perfefdly recovered in her museum of natural cuiiosities. 
Three years afterwards Linnaeus had again sevetal fits of the gout, 
but they were much weaker than formerly, and he always conquered 
their virulence with strawberries. He ate them every summer; they 
purified his blood, rendered his complexion more florid, and banished 
the gout for ever from his frame. 
Exclusive of this new cure of the gout which casual experience had 
taught him, his penetrating genius found the way to many other dis- 
coveries. He first observed in the year 174b, that the worm Taenia 
belonged to the compound creatures, or to the animal plants ; that 
each of its limbs had a mouth and an anus. “ I have examined the 
<c Tcenia,” writes he in a letter to Haller, dated September 13, 
1748*, “ and found fourteen of them alive and completely joined to each 
* Taniam examinavi et repen quatuordecim vivas integras ; qusesivi caput, quod omnes 
raedici in lumbrico lato quaesiverunt, sedfrustra; falsissimum est caput, quod Tulpius habet 
in observationibus. Et fmstra quaeritur caput, nam caput est in singulo articulo, et os in 
singulo articulo ; in una specie subtus, in altera ad latus. Nullus mortalium potuerit intel- 
ligere hunc vermem, qui non intcllexerit polyporum naturam, de quibu3 recentiores tain 
multa. Habet Tania laturam polyporum et propagator sccedentibus articulis, dum quilibet 
articulus vivit et accrecit in perfeftum corpus. Epist. ad Haller, vol. ii. p. 411. 
1 “ other. 
