aeckel is married, with a big brood of children and grandchildren about him. Some of his own children and the grandchildren are about the same age, for Haeckel has two broods, having had two wives, both of whom sympathized with the Teddine philosophy.
With the whole household, including servants, the great scientist is on terms of absolute good camaraderie. The youngsters ride on his back; the older girls decorate him with garlands; the boys work with him in the garden, or together they tramp the fields and climb the hills.
But when it comes to study he goes to his own room in the Zoology Building, enters in and locks the door. When he travels he travels alone, without companion or secretary. Travel to him means intense work; and intense work means to him intense pleasure. Solitude seems necessary to close, consecutive thinking; and in the solitude of travel, through jungle, forest, crowded city, or across wide oceans, Haeckel finds his true and best self. Then it is that he puts his soul in touch with the Universal and realizes most fully Goethe's oft-repeated dictum, "All is one." And, indeed, to Goethe must be given the credit of preparing the mind of Haeckel for Darwinism.
In his book, "The Freedom and Science of Teaching," Haeckel applies the poetic monistic ideas of Goethe to biology and then to sociology. "All is one." And this oneness that everywhere exists is simply a differentiation of the original single cell.
The evolution of the cell mirrors the evolution of the species: the evolution of the individual mirrors the evolution of the race.
This law, expressed by Goethe, is the controlling shibboleth in all Haeckel's philosophy.
In embryology he has proved it to the satisfaction of the scientific world. When he applies it to sociology our Bellamys are looking backward to Sir Thomas More, and expect a sudden transformation to a Utopia, not unlike the change which the good old preachers used to tell us we would experience "in the twinkling of an eye."
Haeckel builds on Darwin and shows that as the Cirripedia which makes the bottom of the ocean, the coral "insect" which rears dangerous reefs and even mountain-ranges, and Rhizopods that make the chalk cliffs possible, did not change the earth's crust in the twinkling of an eye, so neither can the efforts of man instantly change the social condition. Souls do not make lightning changes. Karl Marx thought society would change in the twinkling of a ballot, but he was not a Monist, and therefore did not realize that humanity is a solidarity of souls, evolved from very lowly forms and still slowly ascending.
And the beauty of it is that the Marxians are helping the race to ascend, by supplying it an Ideal, even if they fail utterly to work their lightning change. In the end there is no defeat for any man or any thing. When men deserve the Ideal they will get it. So long as they prefer beer, tobacco, brawls and slums, these things will be supplied. When they get enough of these, something better will be evolved. The stupidity of George the Third was a necessary factor in the evolution of freedom for America. All is one; all is Good; and all is God.
The Marxians will eventually win, but by Fabian methods, and Socialism will come under another name. As opposed to Herbert Spencer, Haeckel does not admit the Unknowable, although, of course, he realizes the unknown. No man ever had a fuller faith, and if there is any such thing as a glorious deathbed it must come to men of this type who believe not only that all is well for themselves, but for every one else. How a deathbed could be "glorious" for a man who had perfect faith in his own salvation and an equally perfect faith in the damnation of most everybody else, is difficult to understand.
A true Monist would rather be in Hell asking for water than in Heaven denying it.
He loves humanity because he is Humanity, and he loves God because he is God. As a single drop of water mirrors the globe, so does a single man mirror the race. And the evolution, biological and sociological, of the man mirrors the evolution of the species.
When one once grasps the beauty and splendor of the monistic idea, how mean and small become all those little, fearsome "schemes of salvation," whereby men were to be separated and impassable gulfs fixed between them. Those who fix gulfs here and now are hotly intent on showing that God will fix gulfs hereafter; thus we see how man is continually creating God in his own image.
His idea of God's justice is always built on his own; and as usually our deities are more or less inherited, heirlooms of the past, we see that it is not at all strange that men should be better than their religion. They drag their dead creeds behind them like a stagecoach, with preachers and priests on top; kings and nobles inside; and coffins full of past sins in the boot. A man is always better than his creed—unless he makes his creed new every day. These hand-me-down religions seldom fit, and professional theology, it seems to me, is mostly a dealing in ol' clo'.
n the month of September, Nineteen Hundred Four, Haeckel was a delegate to the Freethinkers' Congress at Rome. To hold such a convention in the Eternal City, right under the eaves of the Vatican, was surely a trifle "indelicate," to use the words of the Pope. And it was no wonder that at the close of the Congress the Pope at once ordered a sacred housecleaning, a divine fumigation.
Forty years ago he would have acted before the Congress convened, and not afterward. Special mass was held in every one of the Catholic Churches in Rome, "partially to atone for the insult done to Almighty God."
Over three thousand delegates were present at the Congress, every civilized country being represented.
A committee was named to decorate the statue of Bruno that stands on the spot where he was burned for declaring that the earth revolved, and that the stars were not God's jewels hung in the sky each night by angels.
On this occasion, Haeckel said:
"This Congress is historic. It marks a white milepost in the onward and upward march of Freedom.
"We have met in Rome not accidentally or yet incidentally, but purposely. We have met here to show the world that times have changed, that the earth revolves, and to prove to ourselves in an impressive and undeniable way that the power of superstition is crippled, and at last Science and Free Speech need no longer cringe and crawl. We respect the Church for what she is, but our manhood must now realize that it is no longer the slave and tool of entrenched force and power that abrogates to itself the name of religion."
The Haeckel attitude of mind is essentially one of faith—Haeckel's hope for the race is sublime. There are several things we do not know, but we may know some time, just as men know things that children do not.
And yet we are only children in the kindergarten of God. And this garden where we work and play is our own. The boy of ten, or even the man of sixty, may never know, but there will come men greater than these and they will understand. The Monist, the man who believes in the One—the All—is essentially religious.
Haeckel has chosen this word Monism, as opposed to theism, deism, materialism, spiritism.
Doctor Paul Carus is today the ablest American exponent of Monism, and to him it is a positive religion. If Monism could make men of the superb mental type of Paul Carus, well might we place the subject on a compulsory basis and introduce it into our public schools. But Haeckel and Carus believe quite as much in freedom as in Monism. All violence of direction is contrary to growth, and delays evolution just that much.
The One of which we are part and particle—single cells, if you please—is constantly working for its own good. We advance individually as we lie low in the Lord's hand and allow ourselves to be receivers and conveyors of the Divine Will.
And we ourselves are the Divine Will. The contemplation of this divinity excites the religious emotions of awe, veneration, wonder and of worship. It is a world of correlation. The All is right here. There is no outside force or energy; no god or supreme being that looks on, interferes, dictates and decides. To admit that there is an outside power, something uncorrelated, is to invite fear, apprehension, uncertainty and terror. This undissolved residuum is the nest-egg of superstition. The man who believes that God is the Whole, and that every man is a necessary part of the Whole, has no need to placate or please an intangible Something. All he has to do is to be true to his own nature, to live his own life, to understand himself. This takes us back to the Socratic maxim, "Know Thyself." No man ever expressed one phase of Monism so well and beautifully as Emerson has in his "Essay on Compensation." This intelligence in which we are bathed rights every wrong, equalizes every injustice, balances every perversion, punishes the wrong and rewards the right. The Universe is self-lubricating and automatic. The Greeks clearly beheld the sublime truths of Compensation when they pictured Nemesis. It is absurd to punish—leave it to Nemesis—she never forgets—nothing can escape her.
Our duties lie in service to ourselves, and we best serve self by serving humanity. This is the only religion that pays compound interest to both borrower and lender. Worship Humanity and you honor yourself.
And the world has ever dimly perceived this, for history honors no men save those who have given their lives that others might live. The saviors of the world are only those who loved Humanity more than all else. All men who live honest lives are saviors—they live that others may live.
He that saveth his life shall lose it.
We grow through radiation, not by absorption or annexation. To him that hath shall be given. We keep things by giving them to others. The dead carry in their clenched hands only that which they have given away; and the living carry only the love in their hearts which they have bestowed on others.
"I and my Father are one"—the thought is old, but to prove it from the so-called material world through the study of biology has been the life-work of Ernst Haeckel.
LINNÆUS
When a man of genius is in full swing, never contradict him, set him straight or try to reason with him. Give him a free field. A listener is sure to get a greater quantity of good, no matter how mixed, than if the man is thwarted. Let Pegasus bolt—he will bring you up in a place you know nothing about!
LINNÆUS
ut of the mist and fog of time, the name of Aristotle looms up large. It was more than twenty-three hundred years ago that Aristotle lived. He might have lived yesterday, so distinctively modern was he in his method and manner of thought. Aristotle was the world's first scientist. He sought to sift the false from the true—to arrange, classify and systematize.
Aristotle instituted the first zoological garden that history mentions, barring that of Noah. He formed the first herbarium, and made a geological collection that prophesied for Hugh Miller the testimony of the rocks. Very much of our scientific terminology goes back to Aristotle.
Aristotle was born in the mountains of Macedonia. His father was a doctor and belonged to the retinue of King Amyntas. The King had a son named Philip, who was about the same age as Aristotle.
Some years later, Philip had a son named Alexander, who was somewhat unruly, and Philip sent a Macedonian cry over to Aristotle, and Aristotle harkened to the call for help and went over and took charge of the education of Alexander.
The science of medicine in Aristotle's boyhood was the science of simples. In surgery the world has progressed, but in medicine, doctors have progressed most, by consigning to the grave, that tells no tales, the deadly materia medica.
In Aristotle's childhood, when his father was both guide and physician to the king, on hunting trips through the mountains, the doctor taught the boys to recognize sarsaparilla, stramonium, hemlock, hellebore, sassafras and mandrake. Then Aristotle made a list of all the plants he knew and wrote down the supposed properties of each.
Before Aristotle was half-grown, both his father and mother died, and he was cared for by a Mr. and Mrs. Proxenus. This worthy couple would never have been known to the world were it not for the fact that they ministered to this orphan boy. Long years afterward he wrote a poem to their memory, and paid them such a tender, human compliment that their names have been woven into the very fabric of letters. "They loved each other, and still had love enough left for me," he says. And we can only guess whether this man and his wife with hearts illumined by divine passion, the only thing that yet gladdens the world, ever imagined that they were supplying an atmosphere in which would bud and blossom one of the greatest intellects the world has ever known.
It was through the help of Proxenus that Aristotle was enabled to go to Athens and attend the School of Oratory, of which Plato was dean.
The fine, receptive spirit of this slender youth evidently brought out from Plato's heart the best that was packed away there.
Aristotle was soon the star scholar. To get much out of school you have to take much with you when you go there. In one particular, especially, Aristotle, the country boy from Macedonia, brought much to Plato—and this was the scientific spirit. Plato's bent was philosophy, poetry, rhetoric—he was an artist in expression.
"Know thyself," said Socrates, the teacher of Plato.
"Be thyself," said Plato. "Know the world of Nature, of which you are a part," said Aristotle; "and you will be yourself and know yourself without thought or effort. The things you see, you are."
Twenty-three years Aristotle and Plato were together, and when they separated it was on the relative value of science and poetry. "Science is vital," said Aristotle; "but poetry and rhetoric are incidental." It was a little like the classic argument still carried on in all publishing-houses, as to which is the greater: the man who writes the text or the man who illustrates it.
One is almost tempted to think that Plato's finest product was Aristotle, just as Sir Humphry Davy's greatest discovery was Michael Faraday. One fine, earnest, receptive pupil is about all any teacher should expect in a lifetime, but Plato had at least two, Aristotle and Theophrastus. And Theophrastus dated his birth from the day he met Aristotle.
Theo-Phrastus means God's speech, or one who speaks divinely. The boy's real name was Ferguson. But the name given by Aristotle, who always had a passion for naming things, stuck, and the world knows this superbly great man as Theophrastus.
Botany dates from Theophrastus. And Theophrastus it was who wrote that greatest of acknowledgments, when, in dedicating one of his books, he expressed his indebtedness in these words: "To Aristotle, the inspirer of all I am or hope to be."
fter Theophrastus' death the science of botany slept for three hundred years. During this interval was played in Palestine that immortal drama which so profoundly influenced the world. Twenty-three years after the birth of Christ, Pliny, the Naturalist, was born.
He was the uncle of his nephew, and it is probable that the younger man would have been swallowed in oblivion, just as the body of the older one was covered by the eager ashes of Vesuvius, were it not for the fact that Pliny the Elder had made the name deathless.
Pliny the Younger was about such a man as Richard Le Gallienne; Pliny the Elder was like Thomas A. Edison.
At twenty-two, Pliny the Elder was a Captain in the Roman Army doing service in Germany. Here he made memoranda of the trees, shrubs and flowers he saw, and compared them with similar objects he knew at home. "Animal and vegetable life change as you go North and South; from this I assume that life is largely a matter of temperature and moisture." Thus wrote this barbaric Roman soldier, who thereby proved he was not so much of a barbarian after all. When he was twenty-five, his command was transferred to Africa, and here, in the moments stolen from sleep, he wrote a work in three volumes on education, entitled, "Studiosus."
In writing the book he got an education—to find out about a thing, write a book on it. Pliny returned to Rome and began the practise of law, and developed into a special pleader of marked power. He still held his commission in the army, and was sent on various diplomatic errands to Spain, Africa, Germany, Gaul and Greece. If you want things done, call on a busy man: the man of leisure has no spare time.
Pliny's jottings on natural history very soon resolved themselves into the most ambitious plan, which up to that time had not been attempted by man—he would write out and sum up all human knowledge.
The next man to try the same thing was Alexander von Humboldt. We now have Pliny's "Natural History" in thirty-seven volumes. His other forty volumes are lost. The first volume of the "Natural History," which was written last, gives a list of the authors consulted. Aristotle and Theophrastus take the places of honor, and then follow a score of names of men whose works have perished and whom we know mostly through what Pliny says about them. So not only does Pliny write science as he saw it, but introduces us into a select circle of authors whom otherwise we would not know. We have the world of Nature, but we would not have this world of thinkers, were it not for Pliny.
Pliny even quotes Sappho, who loved and sung, and whose poems reached us only through scattered quotations, as if Emerson's works should perish and we would revive him through a file of "The Philistine" magazine. Pliny and Paul were contemporaries. Pliny lived at Rome when Paul lived there in his own hired house, but Pliny never mentioned him, and probably never heard of him.
One man was interested in this world, the other in the next.
Pliny begins his great work with a plagiarism on Lyman Abbott, "There is but one God." The idea that there were many arose out of the thought that because there were many things, there must be special gods to look after them: gods of the harvest, gods of the household, gods of the rain, etc.
There is but one God, says Pliny, and this God manifests Himself in Nature. Nature and Nature's work are one. This world and all other worlds we see or can think of are parts of Nature. If there are other Universes, they are natural; that is to say, a part of Nature. God rules them all according to laws which He Himself can not violate. It is vain to supplicate Him, and absurd to worship Him, for to do these things is to degrade Him with the thought that He is like us. The assumption that God is very much like us is not complimentary to God.
God can not do an unnatural or a supernatural thing. He can not kill Himself. He can not make the greater less than the less. He can not make twice ten anything else than twenty.
He can not make a stick that has but one end. He can not make the past, future. He can not make one who has lived never to have lived. He can not make the mortal, immortal; nor the immortal, mortal. He can change the form of things, but He can not abolish a thing. Pliny preaches the Unity of the Universe and his religion is the religion of Humanity.
Pliny says:
"We can not injure God, but we can injure man. And as man is part of Nature or God, the only way to serve God is to benefit man. If we love God, the way to reveal that love is in our conduct toward our fellows."
Pliny was close upon the Law of the Correlation of Forces, and he almost got a glimpse of the Law of Attraction or Gravitation. He sensed these things, but could not prove them. Pliny touched life at an immense number of points. What he saw, he knew, but when he took things on the word of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville (for these gentlemen adventurers have always lived), he fell into curious errors. For instance, he tells of horses in Africa that have wings, and when hard pressed, fly like birds; of ostriches that give milk, and of elephants that live on land or sea equally well; of mines where gold is found in solid masses and the natives dig into it for diamonds.
But outside of these little lapses, Pliny writes sanely and well. Book Two treats of the crust of the earth, of earthquakes, meteors, volcanoes (these had a strange fascination for him), islands and upheavals.
Books Three and Four relate of geography and give amusing information about the shape of the continents and the form of the earth. Then comes a book on man, his evolution and physical qualities, with a history of the races.
Next is a book on Zoology, with a resume of all that was written by Aristotle, and with many corroborations of Thompson-Seton and Rudyard Kipling. Facts from the "Jungle Book" are here recited at length. Book Nine is on marine life—sponges, shells and coral insects. Book Ten treats of birds, and carries the subject further than it had ever been taken before, even if it does at times contradict John Burroughs. Book Eleven is on insects, bugs and beetles, and tells, among other things, of bats that make fires in caves to keep themselves warm. Book Twelve is on trees, their varieties, height, age, growth, qualities and distribution. Book Thirteen treats of fruits, juices, gums, wax, saps and perfumes. Book Fourteen is on grapes and the making of wine, with a description of the process and the various kinds of wine, their effects on the human system, with a goodly temperance lesson backed up by incidents and examples.
Book Fifteen treats of pomegranates, apples, plums, peaches, figs and various other luscious fruits, and shows much intimate and valuable knowledge. And so the list runs down through, treating at great length of bees, fishes, woods, iron, lead, copper, gold, marble, fluids, gases, rivers, swamps, seas, and a thousand and one things that were familiar to this marvelous man. But of all subjects, Pliny shows a much greater love for botany than for anything else. Plants, flowers, vines, trees and mosses interest him always, and he breaks off other subjects to tell of some flower that he has just discovered.
Pliny had command of the Roman fleet that was anchored in the bay off Pompeii, when that city was destroyed in the year Seventy-nine. Bulwer-Lytton tells the story, with probably a close regard for the facts. The sailors, obeying Pliny's orders, did their utmost to save human life, and rescued hundreds. Pliny himself made various trips in a small boat from the ship to the beach. He was safely on board the flag-ship, and orders had been given to weigh anchor, when the commander decided to make one more visit to the perishing city to see if he could not rescue a few more, and also to get a closer view of Nature in a tantrum.
He rowed away into the fog. The sailors waited for their beloved commander, but waited in vain. He had ventured too close to the flowing lava, and was suffocated by the fumes, a victim to his love for humanity and his desire for knowledge. So died Pliny the Elder, aged but fifty-six years.
ll children are zoologists, but a botanist appears upon the earth only at rare intervals.
A Botanist is born—not made. From the time of Pliny, botany performed the Rip Van Winkle act until John Ray, the son of a blacksmith, appeared upon the scene in England. In the meantime, Leonardo had classified the rocks, recorded the birds, counted the animals and written a book of three thousand pages on the horse. Leonardo dissected many plants, but later fell back upon the rose for decorative purposes.
John Ray was born in Sixteen Hundred Twenty-eight near Braintree in Essex. Now, as to genius—no blacksmith-shop is safe from it. We know where to find ginseng, but genius is the secret of God.
A blacksmith's helper by day, this aproned lad with sooty face dreamed dreams. Evenings he studied Greek with the village parson. They read Aristotle and Theophrastus.
Have a care there, you Macedonian miscreant, dead two thousand years, you are turning this boy's head!
John Ray would be a botanist as great as Aristotle, and he would speak divinely, just as did Theophrastus. It is all a matter of desire! Young Ray became a Minor Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; then a Major Fellow; then he took the Master's degree; next he became lecturer on Greek; and insisted that Aristotle was the greatest man the world had ever seen, except none, and the Dean raised an eyebrow.
The professor of mathematics resigned and Ray took his place; next he became Junior Dean, and then College Steward; and according to the custom of the times he used to preach in the chapel. One of his sermons was from the text, "Consider the lilies of the field." Another sermon that brought him more notoriety than fame was on the subject, "God in Creation," wherein he argued that to find God we should look for Him more in the world of Nature and not so much in books.
Matters were getting strained. Ray was asked to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity, which was a promise that he would never preach anything that was not prescribed by the Church. Ray demurred, and begged that he be allowed to go free and preach anything he thought was truth—new truth might come to him! This shows the absurdity of Ray. He was asked to reconsider or resign. He resigned—resigned the year that Sir Isaac Newton entered.
Fortunately, one particular pupil followed him, not that he loved college less, but that he loved Ray more. This pupil was Francis Willughby. Through the bounty of this pupil we get the scientist—otherwise, Ray would surely have been starved into subjection. Willughby took Ray to the home of his parents, who were rich people.
Ray undertook the education of young Willughby, very much as Aristotle took charge of Alexander. Willughby and Ray traveled, studied, observed and wrote. They went to Spain, took trips to France, Italy and Switzerland, and journeyed to Scotland. Willughby devoted his life to Ornithology and Ichthyology and won a deathless place in science.
Ray specialized on botany, and did a work in classification never done before. He made a catalog of the flora of England that wrung even from Cambridge a compliment—they offered him the degree of LL.D. Ray quietly declined it, saying he was only a simple countryman, and honors or titles would be a disadvantage, tending to separate him from the plain people with whom he worked. However, the Royal Society elected him a member, and he accepted the honor, that he might put the results of his work on record. His paper on the circulation of sap in trees was read before the Royal Society, on the request of Newton. Due credit was given Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood; but Ray made the fine point that man was brother to the tree, and his life was derived from the same Source.
When Willughby died, in Sixteen Hundred Seventy-two, he left Ray a yearly income of three hundred dollars. Doctor Johnson told Boswell that Ray had a collection of twenty thousand English bugs. Our botanical terminology comes more from John Ray than from any other man. Ray adopted wherever possible the names given by Aristotle, so loyal, loving and true was he to the Master. Ray died in Seventeen Hundred Five, aged seventy-six.
wo years after the death of John Ray, in Seventeen Hundred Seven, was born a baby who was destined to find biology a chaos, and leave it a cosmos.
Linnæus did for botany what Galileo had done for astronomy. John Ray was only a John the Baptist.
Carl von Linne, or Carolus Linnæus as he preferred to be called, was born in an obscure village in the Province of Smaland, Sweden. His father was a clergyman, passing rich on forty pounds a year. His mother was only eighteen years old when she bore him, and his father had just turned twenty-one. It was a poor parish, and one of the deacons explained that they could not afford a real preacher; so they hired a boy.
Carl tells in his journal, of remembering how, when he was but four years old, his father would lead his congregation out through the woods and, all seated on the grass, the father would tell the people about the plants and herbs and how to distinguish them.
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.
He had energy plus, and the way he cluttered up the parsonages where he lodged was a distraction to good housewives: birds' nests, feathers, skins, claws, fungi, leaves, flowers, roots, stalks, rocks, sticks and stones—and when one meddled with his treasures, there was trouble. And there was always trouble; for the boy possessed a temper, and usually had it right with him.
The intent of the parents was that Carl should become a clergyman, but his distaste for theology did not go unexpressed. So perverse and persistent were his inclinations that they preyed on the mind of his father, who quoted King Lear and said, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!"
His troubles weighed so upon the good clergyman that his nerves became affected and he went to the neighboring town of Wexio to consult Doctor Rothman, a famed medical expert.
The good clergyman, in the course of his conversation with the doctor, told of his mortification on account of the dulness and perversity of his son.
Doctor Rothman listened in patience and came to the conclusion that young Mr. Linnæus was a good boy who did the wrong thing. All energy is God's, but it may be misdirected. A boy not good enough for a preacher might make a good doctor—an excess of virtue is not required in the recipe for a physician.
"I'll cure you, by taking charge of your boy," said Rothman; "you want to make a clergyman of the youth: I'll let him be just what he wants to be, a naturalist and a physician." And it was so.
he year spent by Linnæus under the roof of Doctor Rothman was a pivotal point in his life. He was eighteen years old. The contempt of Rothman for the refinements of education appealed to the young man. Rothman was blunt, direct, and to the point: he had a theory that people grew by doing what they wanted to do, not by resisting their impulses.
He was both friend and comrade to the boy. They rode together, dissected animals and plants, and the young man assisted in operations. Linnæus had the run of the Doctor's library, and without knowing it, was mastering physiology.
"I would adopt him as my son," said Rothman; "but I love him so much that I am going to separate him from me. My roots have struck deep in the soil: I am like the human trees told of by Dante; but the boy can go on!"
And so Rothman sent him along to the University of Lund, with letters to another doctor still more cranky than himself. This man was Doctor Kilian Stobæus, a medical professor, physician to the king, and a naturalist of note. Stobæus had a mixed-up museum of minerals, birds, fishes and plants.
Everybody for a hundred miles who had a curious thing in the way of natural history sent it to Stobæus. Into this medley of strange and curious things Linnæus was plunged with orders to "straighten it up." There was a German student also living with the doctor, working for his board. Linnæus took the lead and soon had the young German helping him catalog the curios.
The spirit of Ray had gotten abroad in Germany, and Ray's books had been translated and were being used in many of the German schools. Linnæus made a bargain with the German student that they should speak only German—he wanted to find what was locked up in those German books on botany.
Stobæus was lame and had but one eye, so he used to call on the boys to help him, not only to hitch up his horse, but to write his prescriptions. Linnæus wrote very badly, and was chided because he did not improve his penmanship, for it seems that in the olden times physicians wrote legibly. Linnæus resented the rebuke, and was shown the door. He was gone a week, when Stobæus sent for him, much to his relief. This little comedy was played several times during the year, through what Linnæus afterward acknowledged as his fault. One would hardly think that the man who on first seeing the English gorse in full bloom fell on his knees, burst into tears of joy, and thanked God that he had lived to see this day, would have had a fiery temper. Then further, the gentle, spiritual qualities that Linnæus in his later life developed give one the idea that he was always of a gentle nature.
In indexing the museum of Doctor Stobæus, Linnæus found his bent. "I will never be a doctor," he said; "but I can beat the world on making a catalog."
And thus it was: his genius lay in classification. "He indexed and catalogued the world," a great writer has said.
After a year at the University of Lund, with more learned by working for his board than at school, there was a visit from Doctor Rothman, who had just dropped in to see his old friend Stobæus. The fact was, Rothman cared a deal more for Linnæus than he did for Stobæus. "Weeds develop into flowers by transplanting only," said Rothman to Linnæus. "You need a different soil—get out of here before you get pot-bound."
"But about Cyclops?" asked Linnæus.
"Let Cyclops go to the devil!" It was no use to ask permission of Stobæus. Linnæus was so valuable that Stobæus would not spare him.
So Linnæus packed up and departed between the dawn and the day, leaving a letter stating he had gone to Upsala because it seemed best and begging forgiveness for such seeming ingratitude.
When Linnæus got to Upsala he found a letter from Doctor Cyclops, written in wrath, requesting him never again to show his face in Lund. Rothman also lost the friendship of Stobæus for his share in the transaction.
hen Linnæus arrived at Upsala he had one marked distinction, according to his own account—he was the poorest student that had ever knocked at the gates of the University for admittance. Perhaps this is a mistake, for even though the young man had patched his shoes with birch bark, he was not in debt.
And the youth of twenty-one who has health, hope, ambition and animation is not to be pitied. Poverty is only for the people who think poverty.
It is five hundred English miles from Lund to Upsala. After his long, weary tramp, Linnæus sat on the edge of the hill and looked down at the scattered town of Upsala in the valley below. A stranger passing by pointed out the college buildings, where a thousand young men were being drilled and disciplined in the mysteries of learning. "Where is the Botanical Garden?" asked the newcomer.
It was pointed out to him. He gazed on the site, carefully studied the surrounding landscape, and mentally calculated where he would move the Botanical Garden as soon as he had control of it. Let us anticipate here just long enough to explain that the Upsala Botanical Garden now is where Linnæus said it should be. It is a most beautiful place, lined off with close-growing shrubbery. After traversing the winding paths, one reaches the lecture-hall, built after the Greek, with porches, peristyle and gently ascending marble steps. On entering the building, the first object that attracts the visitor is the life-size statue of Linnæus.
To the left, a half-mile away, is the old cathedral—a place that never much interested Linnæus. But there now rests his dust, and in windows and also in storied bronze his face, form and fame endure. In the meantime, we have left the young man sitting on a boulder looking down at the town ere he goes forward to possess it.
He adjusts his shoes with their gaping wounds, shakes the dust from his cap, and then takes from his pack a faded neckscarf, puts it on and he is ready.
Descending the hill he forgets his lameness, waives the stone-bruises, and walks confidently to the Botanical Garden, which he views with a critical eye. Next, he inquires for the General Superintendent who lives near. The young man presents his credentials from Rothman, who describes the youth as one who knows and loves the flowers, and who can be useful in office or garden and is not above spade and hoe. The Superintendent looks at the pink face, touched with bronze from days in the open air, notes the long yellow hair, beholds the out-of-door look of fortitude that comes from hard and plain fare, and inwardly compares these things with the lack of them in some of his students. "But this Doctor—Doctor Rothman who wrote this letter—I do not have the honor of knowing him," says the Superintendent.
"Ah, you are unfortunate," replies the youth; "he is a very great man, and I myself will vouch for him in every way."
Oh! this glowing confidence of youth—before there comes a surplus of lime in the bones, or the touch of winter in the heart! The Superintendent smiled. Knock in faith and the door shall be opened—there are those whom no one can turn away. A stray bed was found in the garret for the stranger, and the next morning he was earnestly at work cataloguing the dried plants in the herbarium, a task long delayed because there was no one to do it.
he study of Natural History in the University of Upsala was, at this time, at a low ebb. It was like the Art Department in many of the American colleges: its existence largely confined to the school catalog. There were many weeks of biting poverty and neglect for Linnæus, but he worked away in obscurity and silence and endured, saying all the time, "The sun will come out, the sun will come out!" Doctor Olaf Rudbeck had charge of the chair of Botany, but seldom sat in it. His business was medicine. He gave no lectures, but the report was that he made his students toil at cultivating in his garden—this to open up their intellectual pores. In the course of his work, Linnæus devised a sex plan of classification, instead of the so-called natural method. He wrote out his ideas and submitted them to Rudbeck.
The learned Doctor first pooh-poohed the plan, then tolerated it, and in a month claimed he had himself devised it. On the scheme being explained to others there was opposition, and Rudbeck requested Linnæus to amplify his notes into a thesis, and read it as a lecture. This was done, and so pleased was the old man that he appointed Linnæus his adjunctus. In the Spring of Seventeen Hundred Thirty, Linnæus began to give weekly lectures on some topic of Natural History.
Linnæus was now fairly launched. His animation, clear thinking, handsome face and graceful ways made his lectures very popular. Science in his hands was no longer the dull and turgid thing it had before been in the University. He would give a lecture in the hall, and then invite the audience to walk with him in the woods. He seemed to know everything: birds, beetles, bugs, beasts, trees, weeds, flowers, rocks and stones were to him familiar.
He showed his pupils things they had walked on all their lives and never seen.
The old Botanical Garden that had degenerated into a kitchen-garden for the Commons was rearranged and furnished with many specimens gathered round about.
A system of exchange was carried on with other schools, and Natural History at Upsala was fast becoming a feature. Old Doctor Rudbeck hobbled around with the classes, and when Linnæus lectured sat in a front seat, applauding by rapping his cane on the floor and ejaculating words of encouragement.
Linnæus was now receiving invitations to lecture at other schools in the vicinity. He made excursions and reports on the Natural History of the country around. The Academy of Science of Upsala now selected him to go to Lapland and explore the resources of that country, which was then little known.
The journey was to be a long and dangerous one. It meant four thousand miles of travel on foot, by sledge and on horseback, over a country that was for the most part mountainous, without roads, and peopled with semi-savages.
There were two reasons why Linnæus should make the trip:
One was he had the hardihood and the fortitude to do it.
And second, he was not wanted at Upsala. He was becoming too popular. One rival professor had gone so far as to prefer formal charges of scientific heresy; he also made the telling point that Linnæus was not a college graduate. The rule of the University was that no lecturer, teacher or professor should be employed who did not have a degree from some foreign University.
Inquiry was made and it was found that Linnæus had left the University of Lund under a cloud. Linnæus was confronted with the charge, and declined to answer it, thus practically pleading guilty. So, to get him out of Upsala seemed a desirable thing, both to friends and to foes. His friends secured the commission for the Lapland exploration, and his enemies made no objections, merely whispering, "Good riddance!" To be twenty-four, in good health, with hair like that of General Custer, a heart to appreciate Nature, a good horse under you, and a commission from the State to do an important work, in your left-hand breast-pocket—what Heaven more complete!
A reception was tendered the young naturalist in the great hall, and he addressed the students on the necessity of doing your work as well as you can, and being kind. Before beginning his arduous and dangerous journey, Linnæus went to Lund to visit his old patron, Doctor Stobæus. Time, the great healer, had cured the Doctor of his hate, and he now spoke of Linnæus as his best pupil. He had left hastily by the wan light of the moon, without leaving orders where his mail was to be forwarded; but now he was received as an honored guest. All the little misunderstandings they had were laughed over as jokes.
From Lund, Linnæus went to his home in Smaland to visit his parents.
It is needless to say that they were very proud of him, and the villagers turned out in great numbers to do him honor, perhaps, in their simplicity, not knowing why.