MEMOIR OF LINNjEES. 
63 
moration of his peculiar tastes even at that age, a 
corner of his fathers garden hore the name of 
Charles*. It was this love for his favourite occu- 
pation, the resistless attraction of fields and mea- 
dows, that must account for the slowness of his 
progress at school, and also for the charge of inca- 
pacity brought against him by one of his teachers, 
Lanarius (whose name Cuvier has taken care to 
preserve), who would have extinguished this me- 
teor of natural science, by counselling his father to 
bind him an apprentice to some obscure profession, 
— a shoemaker, or, according to others, a tailor, 
or a carpenter, — from a belief that Providence had 
not endowed him with sufficient aptitude for a 
liberal education. 
The struggles and hardships he was doomed to 
encounter in his youth, had no effect in damping 
his ardour or slackening his application. It often 
happens that poverty, instead of disheartening or 
overwhelming genius, only developes and fortifies 
it the more ; and when we read of the future Pliny 
of the North receiving at college the alms of the 
charitable, wearing the cast-off' clothes of his com- 
* It is recorded of the mother of Linnseus, that when she 
peroeived the bent of his mind so contrary to the studies for 
the church, to which he was originally destined, she expressly 
forbade her other son, Samuel, from ever entering his father’s 
garden, being persuaded that he would there contract those 
tastes and habits that had defeated her fond hopes of making 
Charles a clergyman. 
