Arrived in the province of Medelpad, he ascended its highest mountain, leaving his horse “tied to an ancient Runic monumental stone.” He found several uncommon plants here; and from the summit, gazed on the country spread out below, varied with plains and cultivated fields, villages, lakes, and rivers—a most picturesque and romantic region. The descent was very difficult, and even dangerous. Leaving this mountain, he took his route along the sea-shore, which was spread with the wrecks of vessels, telling to the feeling heart of the young traveller a sad tale of woe. “How many prayers, sighs, tears, vows, and lamentations—all, alas! in vain—rose to my imagination at this melancholy spectacle!” he exclaims. The sight reminded him of a student who, going by sea from Stockholm to Abo, experienced so severely the terrors of the ocean, that he chose to walk back round the head of the Bothnian Gulf, rather than adventure himself again upon the deep. This youth, afterwards a Professor at Abo, assumed the surname of Tillands, expressive of his attachment to _terra firma_, and Linnæus named in honour of him, a plant which cannot bear wet. In five or six days, Linnæus reached Hernosand, the principal town of Angermania, on the Bothnian Gulf, and visited a tremendously steep and lofty mountain called Skula, where was a cavern, which he desired to explore. Here he was within a hair’s breadth of a fatal accident, for one of the peasants who accompanied him, in climbing up, loosened a large stone, which was hurled down the track Linnæus had just left, and fell exactly on the spot he had occupied. “If I had not (he says) providentially changed my route, nobody would ever have heard of me more; I was surrounded by fire and smoke, and should certainly, but for the protecting hand of Providence, have been crushed to pieces.” From this point of the journey a change came over the face of nature. The country was covered over with snow, in some places inches deep; the pretty spring flowers disappeared, and in their place nothing but wintry plants were seen peeping through the snow. At length, on the 23rd of May, he reached Umœa, in West Bothnia, where he turned out of the main road to the left, designing to visit Lycksele, Lapmark; by which means he lost the advantage of the regular post horses, and found the ways so narrow and intricate, that at every step he stumbled. “In this dreary wilderness I began to feel very solitary, and to long earnestly for a companion (he says); the few inhabitants I met had a foreign accent, and always concluded their sentences with an adjective.”