care of itself.  But now he put them both to shame.  At Leyden he found friends who brought out his first book, “Systema Naturae,” in which he divides all nature into the three kingdoms known to every child since.  It was hardly more than a small pamphlet, but it laid the foundation for his later fame.  To the enlarged tenth edition zooelogists point back to this day as to the bed-rock on which they built their science.  The first was quickly followed by another, and yet another.  Seven large volumes bearing his name had come from the press before he set sail for home, a whole library in botany, and a new botany at that, so simple and sensible that the world adopted it at once.

Dr. Hermann Boerhaave was at that time the most famous physician in Europe.  He was also the greatest authority on systematic botany.  Great men flocked to his door, but the testy old Dutchman let them wait until it suited him to receive them.  Peter the Great had to cool his heels in his waiting-room two long hours before his turn came.  Linnaeus he would not see at all—­until he sent him a copy of his book.  Then he shut the door against all others and summoned the author.  The two walked through his garden, and the old doctor pointed proudly to a tree which was very rare, he said, and not in any of the books.  Yes, said Linnaeus, it was in Vaillant’s.  The doctor knew better; he had annotated Vaillant’s botany himself, and it was not there.  Linnaeus insisted, and the doctor, in a temper, went for the book to show him.  But there it was; Linnaeus was right.  Nothing would do then but he must stay in Holland.  Linnaeus demurred; he could not afford it.  But Dr. Boerhaave knew a way out of that.  He had for a patient Burgomaster Cliffort, a rich old hypochondriac with whom he could do nothing because he would insist on living high and taking too little exercise.  When he came again he told him that what he needed was a physician in daily attendance upon him, and handed him over to Linnaeus.

“He will fix your diet and fix your garden, too,” was his prescription.  The Burgomaster was a famous collector and had a wondrous garden that was the apple of his eye.  He took Linnaeus into his house and gave him a ducat a day for writing his menu and cataloguing his collection.  That was where his books grew, and the biggest and finest of them was “Hortus Cliffortianus,” the account of his patron’s garden.

Armed with letters from Dr. Boerhaave and the Burgomaster, he took one stronghold of professional prejudice after another.  Not without a siege.  One of them refused flatly to surrender.  That was Sir Hans Sloan, the great English naturalist, to whom Dr. Boerhaave wrote in a letter that is preserved in the British Museum:  “Linnaeus, who bears this letter, is alone worthy of seeing you, alone worthy of being seen by you.  He who shall see you both together shall see two men whose like will scarce ever be found in the world.”  And the doctor was no flatterer,