The Lives of Celebrated Travellers Author:James Augustus St. John Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the sixtieth year of his age, and was buried at Brain- ley, where a monument was erected to his memory by his widow. The Shawia in botany received its name in ho... more »nour of Dr. Shaw. . FREDERIC HASSELQUIST. Born 1722.—Died 1751 Hasselquist was born on the 3d of January, 1722, at Isernvall, in Eastern Gothland, in Sweden. His father, Andrew Hasselquist, who was the clergyman of the place, died in great poverty while our traveller was yet a youth; and to add still further to his misfortune, his mother likewise was shortly afterward so extremely debilitated both in mind and body as to be compelled to take refuge in the infirmary of Vas- tona. Hasselquist would therefore in all probability have been condemned to a life of obscurity and poverty had not M. Pontin, his maternal uncle, undertaken the care of his education, and sent him with his own children to the college of Linkoping. But all the friends of Hasselquist seemed destined to be short-lived. Not long after his entrance at college the loss of this kind benefactor reduced him to the necessity of teaching for a livelihood until he should be of the proper age to enter into the university. In 1741 he entered a student at the university of Upsal; but poverty, which when not overwhelming acts as a spur to genius, was still his faithful companion, and compelled him for a subsistence to exercise his talents in the way of all others best calculated to give them amplitude and vigour. He became a tutor. At the same time, however, he en joyed the advantage of attending the lectures of the various professors; and the knowledge thus acquiredwas immediately digested, examined, and enlarged, to be transmitted in other lectures to his own humble pupils. Physic and natural history, for which, according to Linnaeus, he had an innate i...« less