Back of the parsonage there was a goodly garden, where the young pastor and his wife worked many happy hours. When Carl was eight years of age, a corner of this garden was set apart for his very own.
He pressed into his service several children of the neighborhood, and they carried flat stones from the near-by brook to wall in this miniature farm—this botanical garden.
The child that hasn't a flowerbed or a garden of its ownest own is being cheated out of its birthright.
The evolution of the child mirrors the evolution of the race. And as the race has passed through the savage, pastoral and agricultural stages, so should the child. As a people we are now in the commercial or competitive stage, but we are slowly emerging out of this into the age of co-operation or enlightened self-interest.
It is only a very great man—one with a prophetic vision—who can see beyond the stage in which he is.
The stage we are in seems the best and the final one—otherwise, we would not be in it. But to skip any of these stages in the education or evolution of the individual seems a sore mistake. Children hedged and protected from digging in the dirt develop into "third rounders," as our theosophic friends would say, that is, educated non-comps—vast top-head and small cerebellum—people who can explain the unknowable, but who do not pay cash. Third rounders all—fit only for the melting-pot!
A tramp is one who has fallen a victim of arrested development and never emerged from the nomadic stage; an artistic dilettante is one who has jumped the round where boys dig in the dirt and has evolved into a missnancy.
Young Carl Linnæus skipped no round in his evolution. He began as a savage, robbing birds' nests, chasing butterflies, capturing bees, bugs and beetles. He trained goats to drive, hitched up a calf, fenced his little farm, and planted it with strange and curious crops.
Clergymen once were the only schoolteachers, and in Sweden, when Linnæus was a boy, there was a plan of farming children out among preachers that they might be educated. Possibly this plan of having some one besides the parents teach the lessons is good—I can not say. But young Carl did not succeed—save in disturbing the peace among the households of the half-dozen clergymen who in turn had him.
The boy evidently was a handsome fellow, a typical Swede, with hair as fair as the sunshine, blue eyes, and a pink face that set off the fair hair and made him look like a Circassian.