at that and drew upon Rosen, and there might have been one regular less but for the interference of bystanders.  It may be true, though it is not like him.  Men wore side-arms in those days just as some people carry pistols in their hip-pockets to-day, and with as little sense.  At least they had the defence, such as it was, that it was the fashion.  However, it made an end of Linnaeus at Upsala for the time.  He sought a professorship at Lund, but another got it.  Then he led an expedition of his former students into the Dalecarlia mountains and so he got to Falun, where Baron Reuterholm, one of Sweden’s copper magnates, was seeking a guide for his two sons through the region where his mines were.

Linnaeus was not merely a botanist, but an all around expert in natural science.  He took charge of the boys and, when the trip was ended, started a school at Falun, where he taught mineralogy.  It had been hit or miss with the miners up till then.  There was neither science nor system in their work.  What every-day experience or the test of fire had taught a prospector, in delving among the rocks, was all there was of it.  Linnaeus was getting things upon a scientific basis, when he met and fell in love with the handsome daughter of Dr. Moraeus.  The young people would marry, but the doctor, though he liked the mineralogist, would not hear of it till he could support a wife.  So he gave him three years in which to go abroad and get a degree that would give him the right to practise medicine anywhere in Sweden.  The doctor’s daughter gave him a hundred dollars she had saved, and her promise to wait for him.

He went to Harderwyk in Holland and got his degree at the university there on the strength of a thesis on the cause of malarial fever, with the conclusions of which the learned doctors did not agree; but they granted the diploma for the clever way in which he defended it.  On the way down he tarried in Hamburg long enough to give the good burghers a severe jolt.  They had a seven-headed serpent that was one of the wonders of the town.  The keen sight of the young naturalist detected the fraud at once; the heads were weasels’ heads, covered with serpent’s skin and cunningly sewed on the head of the reptile.  The shape of the jaws betrayed the trick.  But the Hamburgers were not grateful.  The serpent was an asset.  There was a mortgage on it of ten thousand marks; now it was not worth a hundred.  They took it very ill, and Linnaeus found himself suddenly so unpopular that he was glad to get out of town overnight.  What became of the serpent history does not record.

Linnaeus had carried more than his thesis on malarial fever with him to Holland.  At the bottom of his trunk were the manuscripts of two books on botany which, he told his sweetheart on parting, would yet make him famous.  Probably she shook her head at that.  Pills and powders, and broken legs to set, were more to her way of thinking, and her father’s, too.  If only he had patients, fame might take