At length it was thought desirable that these flowery pursuits should give way to more serious occupations, and he was committed to the charge of a private tutor, whom he calls “a passionate and morose man, better calculated for extinguishing a youth’s talents than for improving them.” Nor did he fare any better in his next remove, which was to the grammar school at Wexiö, where the masters “pursued the same methods, preferring stripes and punishments to encouragements and admonitions.” Probably the boy evinced his distaste for such coercive measures, since we find him soon removed from school to the care of another private teacher, of whose mild and gentle disposition he speaks in terms of approval. Nevertheless, he too failed to inspire in his pupil a love for the studies which were considered necessary as preparatory to admission into holy orders; for Nils Linnæus, desirous that his eldest son should become his assistant and eventually his successor, designed him for the Church. The boy had to work for three years before he was promoted to a higher “form” in the school, called the “circle;” and the principal use he seems to have made of the greater liberty allowed him in this new rank, was to shun the usual exercises and give himself up to the study of his favourite pursuit—the knowledge of flowers. He acknowledges that his time was chiefly spent in wandering about the outskirts of the town, and making himself acquainted with all the plants he could find. According to the system then pursued in Sweden, it was necessary that youths should pass from the schools or private tutors to a superior seminary, called the Gymnasium, where the higher branches of literature were taught; and accordingly, at the age of seventeen, the young Linnæus was removed thither. But the original predilections of his mind were then still more strikingly evinced and matured. He showed the strongest distaste for theological studies. In the metaphysics, ethics, Greek and Hebrew, and theology his companions far outstripped him; but in mathematics, and particularly physics, he as much excelled them. His favourite science, botany, which at that time was wholly neglected, still continued to be his most engrossing pursuit, and he soon contrived to form a small library of books in that branch. Among others he mentions the “Chloris Gothica” of Bromelius, and Rudbeck’s “Hortus Upsaliensis,” which he confesses his inability then to comprehend clearly. Nevertheless he says he “continued to read them day and night, and committed them to memory.” His own copies of these books, “used with the utmost care and neatness,” were preserved among his library, and after his death were sold with his collection. The zeal and eagerness he evinced in these studies procured him, both among masters and scholars, the name of “the Little Botanist.”