OUTWARD APPEARANCE OF LINNAEUS. 261 
I 
honour of her, described and recorded in the transactions of the Royal 
Academy of Sciences of Stockholm , (tom. xxiii. 1762). 
The stature of Linnaeus was a little below the common size, 
though neither lusty nor lean, yet the structure of his frame was strong 
and solid. He rather stooped a little when walking, and had con- 
tracted this habit from the frequent examination of plants, and from 
his constant search after vegetable or other natural productions. From 
his infancy his veins had much swelled with blood. His head was large, 
somewhat elevated backwards, and a traverse line separated the fore- 
part from the hind. His eyes were brown and fiery, his sight was very 
sharp, and his ear extremely quick in catching every sound, except 
music. It is rather singular, that the man, who was all alive to joy 
and social harmony, should have felt an antipathy, as it were, for that art 
which best expresses those affeClions, and has mostly been the delight 
of great men. Even the grave and serious Boerhaave found his 
chief comfort and recreation in music*. Another circumstance to be 
noticed as a peculiarity in LinnjEus was, that his memory, so excel- 
lent and uncommonly vigorous in his youth and in the flower of his 
age, — that memory which encompassed whatever was remarkable in 
nature, — became at last as weak as it formerly had been strong, and 
began already to fall off very considerably after lie had completed his 
fiftieth year. To the too violent exertion and overburdening of hi* 
memory, its early decay ought, therefore, to be attributed. 
His memory, like all his talents and endowments was, in point of 
science, solely devoted to natural history. He loved the Belles Lettrcs s 
• Fessus— writes Boerhaave of himself in his diary— testudinis concentu solafcatur las- 
»itudinen> ; musices amantissimus. 
and' 
