OF THE LIFE OF LINNAEUS. 
209 
offer made to him from Madrid , was soon after realized at Stockholm. On 
the 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 Linnaeus. 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 die 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 distinblive 
chara&ers 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. 
Li nNjEUS 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 t. 
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 introduction of foreign trees and 
alpine plants, suitable to their climate and soil. He communicated this 
treatise to the academy of sciences of Stockholm. Count Spar re had 
„ * 
* In the letters patent of knighthood Linn je u s makes the 2044 families of inferior 
nobility then in Sweden. 
| De plantis, qua: Alpium Suecicarum indigene, magno rei occonomic* et medic* emo- 
lumento fieri possint ; — Sec transaftions of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences of 1755, 
vol. v. 
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