“Go to bed and sleep like other people,” he said gruffly, yet kindly, when he had heard it all, “and hereafter study in the daytime;” and he not only gave him a key to his library, but took him to his own table after that.  Up till then Carl had merely been a lodger in the house.

When he was at last on the home stretch, as it seemed, an accident came near upsetting it all.  He was stung by an adder on one of his botanizing excursions, so far from home and help that the bite came near proving fatal.  However, Dr. Stobaeus’ skill pulled him through, and in after years he got square by labelling the serpent furia infernalis—­hell-fury—­in his natural history.  It was his way of fighting back.  All through his life he never wasted an hour on controversy.  He had no time, he said.  But once when a rival made a particularly nasty attack upon him, he named a new plant after him, adding the descriptive adjective detestabilis—­the detestable so-and-so.  On the whole, he had the best of it; for the names he gave stuck.

It was during his vacation after the year at Lund that Linnaeus made a catalogue of the plants in his father’s garden at Stenbrohult that shows us the country parson as no mean botanist himself; for in the list, which is preserved in the Academy of Sciences at Stockholm, are no less than two hundred and twenty-four kinds of plants.  Among them are six American plants that had found their way to Sweden.  The poison ivy is there, though what they wanted of that is hard to tell, and the four-o’clock, the pokeweed, the milkweed, the pearly everlasting, and the potato, which was then (1732) classed as a rare plant.  Not until twenty years later did they begin to grow it for food in Sweden.

When Carl Linnaeus went up to Upsala University, his parents had so far got over their disappointment at his deserting the ministry that they gave him a little money to make a start with; but they let him know that no more was coming—­their pocket-book was empty.  And within the twelvemonth, for all his scrimping and saving, he was on the point of starvation.  He tells us himself that he depended on chance for a meal and wore his fellow students’ cast-off clothes.  His boots were without soles, and in his cheerless attic room he patched them with birch bark and card board as well as he could.  He was now twenty-three years old, and it seemed as if he would have to give up the study that gave him no bread; but still he clung to his beloved flowers.  They often made him forget the pangs of hunger.  And when the cloud was darkest the sun broke through.  He was sitting in the Botanical Garden sketching a plant, when Dean Celsius, a great orientalist and theologian of his day, passed by.  The evident poverty of the young man, together with his deep absorption in his work, arrested his attention; he sat down and talked with him.  In five minutes Carl had found a friend and the Dean a helper.  He had been commissioned to write a book on the plants of the Holy Land and had collected a botanical library for the purpose, but the work lagged.  Here now was the one who could help set it going.  That day Linnaeus left his attic room and went to live in the Dean’s house.  His days of starvation were over.