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 Rosen, 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, Linnaeus 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.”