While he gave generously during his life, he said, "they who give nothing till they die, never give at all,"—he left a personal estate of one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, to be divided among his nephews and nieces.
The world honored him at last, and has through all the years. Bishop Burnet said, "Newton had the whitest soul he ever knew." His habits were of the best. When asked to take snuff or tobacco, he declined, saying, "he would make no necessities to himself."
He was modest to the last, saying, "that whatever service he had done the public was not owing to any extraordinary sagacity, but solely to industry and patient thought." He said, a short time before his death: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
CARL LINNÆUS.
It was on the 24th of July that we left Stockholm, the Venice of the North, built on her nine islands, for the famous university town of Upsala, Sweden. The ride, of about two hours by rail, lay along fine fields of wheat, blue with corn-flowers, and past comfortable-looking red farmhouses and barns.
The town, of thirteen thousand people, is quaint and quiet, yet most interesting to a stranger. We wander over the grand old Gothic cathedral, begun six hundred years ago. Here is the silver-gilt sarcophagus of King Eric IX., who died in 1160, and of John III. Here, also, that of Gustavus Vasa, the deliverer of Sweden, on a high marble pedestal supported by pillars, a recumbent figure of a wife on either side. A third wife is buried near by. The walls of the chapel where he lies are covered with frescoes, depicting scenes in that wonderful life; from the rags of the miner, to the sumptuousness of the throne.
But especially are we interested in a plain slab, underneath which sleeps the man who, more than any other, has immortalized Upsala University, and helped to make Sweden an intellectual and studious country. Near by is the monument of dark porphyry, with the plain, shaven face in bronze, wreathed with laurel, and the words "Carolo a Linné Botanicorum Principi Amici et Discipuli, 1798."
CARL LINNÆUS.
