Hero Tales of the Far North

by Jacob A. Riis

“Do, and be welcome,” said the professor, and his visitor after a brief glance at the flower told its species correctly. The professor stared.

“Now,” said Linnæus, who had kept his eyes open, “what did you mean by the crosses you had put all through my book?” He had seen it lying on the professor’s table, all marked up.

“They mark the errors you made,” declared the other.

“Suppose we see about that,” said the younger man and, taking the book, led the way. They examined the flowers together, and when they returned to the study all the pride had gone out of the professor. He kept Linnæus with him a month, never letting him out of his sight and, when he left, implored him with tears to stay and share his professorship; the pay was enough for both.

A letter that reached him from home on his return to Holland made him realize with a start that he had overstayed his leave. It was now in the fourth year since he had left Sweden. All the while he had written to his sweetheart in the care of a friend who proved false. He wanted her for himself and, when the three years had passed, told her that Carl would never come back. Dr. Moræus was of the same mind, and had not a real friend of the absent lover turned up in the nick of time Linnæus would probably have stayed a Dutchman to his death. Now, on the urgent message of his friend, he hastened home, found his Elisabeth holding out yet, married her and settled down in Stockholm to practise medicine.

Famous as he had become, he found the first stretch of the row at home a hard one to hoe. His books brought him no income. Nobody would employ him, “even for a sick servant,” he complained. Envious rivals assailed him and his botany, and there were days when herring and black bread was fare not to be despised in Dr. Linnæus’ household. But he kept pegging away and his luck changed. One well-to-do patient brought another, and at last the queen herself was opportunely seized with a bad cough. She saw one of her ladies take a pill and asked what it was. Dr. Linnæus’ prescription for a cold, she said, and it always cured her right up. So the doctor was called to the castle and his cure worked there, too. Not long after that he set down in his diary that “Now, no one can get well without my help.”

But he was not happy. “Once, I had flowers and no money,” he said; “now, I have money and no flowers.” That they appointed him professor of medicine at Upsala did not mend matters. His lectures were popular and full of common sense. Diet and the simple life were his hobbies, temperance in all things. He ever insisted that where one man dies from drinking too much, ten die from overeating. Children should eat four times a day, grown-ups twice, was his rule. The foolish fashions and all luxury he abhorred. He himself in his most famous years lived so plainly that some said he was miserly, and his clothes were sometimes almost shabby. The happiest day of his life came when he and his old enemy Rosén, whom he found filling the chair of botany at the university, and with whom he made it up soon after they became fellow members of the faculty, exchanged chairs with the ready consent of the authorities. So, at last, Linnæus had attained the place he coveted above all others, and the goal of his ambition was reached.

He lived at Upsala thirty-seven years and wrote many books. His students idolized him. They came from all over the world. Twice a week in summer, on Wednesday and Saturday, they sallied forth with him to botanize in field and forest, and when they had collected specimens all the long day they escorted the professor home through the twilight streets with drums and trumpets and with flowers in their hats. But however late they left him at his door, the earliest dawn saw him up and at his work, for the older he grew the more precious the hours that remained. In summer he was accustomed to rise at three o’clock; in the dark winter days at six.

He found biology a chaos and left it a science. In his special field of botany he was not, as some think, the first. He himself catalogued fully a thousand books on his topic. But he brought order into it; he took what was good and, rejecting the false, fashioned it into a workable system. In the mere matter of nomenclature, his way of calling plants, like men, by a family name and a given name wrought a change hard to appreciate in our day. The common blue grass of our lawns, for instance, he called, and we call it still, Poa pratensis. Up to his time it had three names and one of them was Gramen pratense paniculatum majus latiore folio poa theophrasti. Dr. Rydberg, of the New York Botanical Gardens, said aptly at the bicentenary of his birth, that it was as if instead of calling a girl Grace Darling one were to say “Mr. Darling’s beautiful, slender, graceful, blue-eyed girl with long, golden curls and rosy cheeks.”

The binomial system revolutionized the science. What the lines of longitude and latitude did for geography Linnæus’ genius did for botany. And he did not let pride of achievement persuade him that he had said the last word. He knew his system to be the best till some one should find a better, and said so. The King gave him a noble name and he was proud of it with reason—vain, some have said. But vanity did not make the creature deny the Creator. He ever tried to trace science to its author. When the people were frightened by the “water turning to blood” and overzealous priests cried that it was a sign of the wrath of God, he showed under the magnifying glass the presence of innumerable little animals that gave the water its reddish tinge, and thereby gave offence to some pious souls. But over the door of his lecture room were the words in Latin: “Live guiltless—God sees you!” and in his old age, seeing with prophetic eye the day of bacteriology that dawned a hundred years after his death, he thanked God that He had permitted him to “look into His secret council room and workshop.”