[8] This also is correct.
[9] A few further remarks on the above subject, printed in the Flora Lapponica, may be acceptable to the English reader.
"This disease made no regular progress, nor was it communicated by infection from one animal to another. The cows are driven all together in the spring to feed in a meadow, near the town, to the southwest, on the other side of a creek of the river, in which I was informed the greatest mortality happened. The symptoms differ in different cases; but all the cattle, feeding indiscriminately, are seized with a swelling of the abdomen, attended with convulsions, and die with horrid bellowing, in the space of a few days. No person dares venture to flay the recent carcases, it having been found by experience that not only the hands, but even the face, in consequence of the warm steams from the body, became inflamed and gangrenous, and that death finally ensued.
"I was asked whether this disease was a kind of plague; whether the meadow in question produced any venomous spiders; or whether the yellow-coloured water was poisonous.
"That it was no plague appeared from its not being contagious, and from the spring being its most fatal season. I saw no spiders here, except what are common throughout all Sweden; nor was the yellow sediment of the water any thing more than a common innocent ochre of iron.
"I had scarcely landed from the boat in which I was taken to this meadow, than the Cicuta presented itself before me, and explained the cause of all this destruction. It is most abundant in the meadow where the cattle are first seized with the distemper, especially near the shore. The slightest observation teaches us that brute animals distinguish, by natural instinct, such plants as are wholesome to them, from such as are poisonous. The cattle therefore do not eat this Hemlock in summer or autumn; whence few of them perish at those seasons, and such only as devour the herb in question incautiously, or from an inordinate appetite. But when they are first turned out in the spring, partly from their eagerness for fresh herbage, partly from their long fasting and starvation, they seize with avidity whatever comes within their reach. The herbage is then but short, and insufficient to satisfy them; probably also it is in general more succulent, immersed under water, and scarcely perceptibly scented; so that they are unable to distinguish the wholesome from the pernicious kinds. I remarked every where that the radical leaves only were cropped, no others; which confirmed what I have asserted. In a neighbouring meadow I saw this same plant cut with the hay for winter food; so that it is no wonder if in that state some, even of the more cautious cattle, are destroyed by it." Fl. Lapp. ed. 2. 76.
[10] This plant is not mentioned in the Flora Lapponica, and the account annexed seems to belong to Ligusticum scoticum, n. 107 of that work, with which it well agrees.
[11] Linnæus in this description denominates these leaflets, whether of the general or partial involucrum, radii, a term he always subsequently used for the stalks of the umbels.
[12] King Charles the Eleventh, on his visit to Tornea in 1694, was accompanied by Count G. Douglas the Lord Lieutenant, Count Piper Counsellor of Chancery, J. Hoghusen Counsellor of the Board of War, and some other learned men, and in the night between the 13th and 14th of June saw, from the belfry of the church, the midnight sun, at that time visible there to a person placed on such an elevation. The year following, Professors Bilberg and Spole were sent to Tornea to repeat these observations. The royal visit to Tornea was commemorated by a medal struck on the occasion, having on one side the bust of the king; on the reverse, a representation of the sun half above the horizon, with this motto, Soli inocciduo Sol obvius alter; and beneath, Iter Regis ad Botniam Occidentalem, Mense Junio 1694.
[13] Stegerhusen. I have not been able to make out the precise meaning of this word.