EARLY STUDENT YEARS 
35 
in 1729, a catalogue of the rarer plants he had met 
with in Smaland and Skane. 
Of even greater importance for Linnaeus’s early 
years at Uppsala, as regards his scientific develop¬ 
ment, was the acquaintance he made with a medical 
student, Petrus Artedi. Like Linnaeus, he had been 
destined from his cradle to become a priest avita 
premere vestigia [to follow the ancestral traces], but 
even when at school, his taste for natural history was 
kindled, and also for alchemy, to which he devoted 
all his spare time. He left Hernosand’s Gymnasium 
summa cum laude in 1724, betook himself to Uppsala 
so that he might study divinity as his relations 
wished, but soon turned to natural history. In spite 
of his father’s exhortations to fly from the tempting 
sirens, he entered the medical faculty, and it was 
soon said of him, that he was the only medical student 
who then had a reputation for vivacity. It is there¬ 
fore not surprising that Linnaeus, after arrival at 
Uppsala, wanted to make his acquaintance, but 
Artedi had then gone home to Angermanland, to bid 
farewell to his father, then seriously ill. After his 
father’s death, Artedi came back to Uppsala, where 
he was soon sought out by Linnaeus, who relates, “ I 
found him pale, cast-down and tearful; the talk at 
once fell upon plants, minerals and animals. The 
ideas which he propounded were new to me, and 
the knowledge which he disclosed, astonished me.” 
Though very different both in stature and tempera¬ 
ment (Artedi being tall, deliberate and earnest, while 
Linnaeus was small, active, hasty, quick-witted) they 
struck up a lasting friendship, which not even death 
could sever. It became a necessity for them to meet 
every day to share their common beloved objects, and 
to impart to each other what each had in the interval 
gathered or observed. An ardent disposition was 
the same in both; both desired to appropriate 
knowledge from the entire field of natural history, 
but each had with greater predilection devoted him- 
