Hero Tales of the Far North Part 10

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) cla.s.sed 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, pa.s.sed 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.

In the Dean's employ his organizing genius developed the marvellous skill of the cataloguer that brought order out of the chaos of groping and guessing and blundering in which the science of botany had floundered up till then. Here and there in it all were flashes of the truth, which Linnaeus laid hold of and pinned down with his own knowledge to system and order. Thus the Frenchman, Sebastian Vaillant, who had died a dozen years before, had suggested a cla.s.sification of flowers by their seed-bearing organs, the stamens and pistils, instead of by their fruits, the number of their petals, or even by their color, as had been the vague practice of the past.

Linnaeus seized upon this as the truer way and wrote a brief treatise developing the idea, which so pleased Dr. Celsius that he got his young friend a license to lecture publicly in the Botanical Garden.

The students flocked to hear him. His message was one that put life and soul into the dry bones of a science that had only wearied them before. The professor of botany himself sat in the front row and hammered the floor with his cane in approval. But his very success was the lecturer's undoing. Envy grew in place of the poverty he had conquered. The instructor, Nils Rosen, was abroad taking his doctor's degree. He came home to find his lectures deserted for the irresponsible teachings of a mere undergraduate. He made grievous complaint, and Linnaeus was silenced, to his great good luck. For so his friend the professor, though he was unable to break the red tape of the university, got him an appointment to go to Lapland on a botanical mission. His enemies were only too glad to see him go.

Linnaeus travelled more than three thousand miles that summer through a largely unknown country, enduring, he tells us, more hardships and dangers than in all his subsequent travels. Again and again he nearly lost his life in swollen mountain streams, for he would not wait until danger from the spring freshets was over. Once he was shot at as he was gathering plants on a hillside, but happily the Finn who did it was not a good marksman. Fish and reindeer milk were his food, a pestilent plague of flies his worst trouble. But, he says in his account of the trip, which is as fascinating a report of a scientific expedition as was ever penned, they were good for something, after all, for the migrating birds fed on them. From his camps on lake or river bank he saw the water covered far and near with swarms of ducks and geese. The Laplander's larder was easily stocked.

He came back from the dangers of the wild with a reputation that was clinched by his book "The Flora of Lapland," to find the dragon of professional jealousy rampant still at Upsala. His enemy, Rosen, persuaded the senate of the university to adopt a rule that no un-degreed man should lecture there to the prejudice of the regularly appointed instructors. Tradition has it that Linnaeus flew into a pa.s.sion 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 a.s.set. 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 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 zoologists 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 Cliffortia.n.u.s," 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, as may be inferred from his treatment of Peter the Great. But the aged baronet had had his own way so long, and was so well pleased with it, that he would have nothing to do with Linnaeus. At Oxford the learned professor Dillenius received him with no better grace. "This," he said aside to a friend, "is the young man who confounds all botany," and he took him rather reluctantly into his garden. A plant that was new to him attracted Linnaeus' attention and he asked to what family it belonged.

"That is more than you can tell me," was the curt answer.

"I can, if you will let me pluck a flower and examine it."

"Do, and be welcome," said the professor, and his visitor after a brief glance at the flower told its species correctly. The professor stared.

"Now," said Linnaeus, who had kept his eyes open, "what did you mean by the crosses you had put all through my book?" He had seen it lying on the professor's table, all marked up.

"They mark the errors you made," declared the other.

"Suppose we see about that," said the younger man and, taking the book, led the way. They examined the flowers together, and when they returned to the study all the pride had gone out of the professor.

He kept Linnaeus with him a month, never letting him out of his sight and, when he left, implored him with tears to stay and share his professorship; the pay was enough for both.

A letter that reached him from home on his return to Holland made him realize with a start that he had overstayed his leave. It was now in the fourth year since he had left Sweden. All the while he had written to his sweetheart in the care of a friend who proved false. He wanted her for himself and, when the three years had pa.s.sed, told her that Carl would never come back. Dr. Moraeus was of the same mind, and had not a real friend of the absent lover turned up in the nick of time Linnaeus would probably have stayed a Dutchman to his death. Now, on the urgent message of his friend, he hastened home, found his Elisabeth holding out yet, married her and settled down in Stockholm to practise medicine.

Famous as he had become, he found the first stretch of the row at home a hard one to hoe. His books brought him no income. n.o.body would employ him, "even for a sick servant," he complained. Envious rivals a.s.sailed him and his botany, and there were days when herring and black bread was fare not to be despised in Dr. Linnaeus'

household. But he kept pegging away and his luck changed. One well-to-do patient brought another, and at last the queen herself was opportunely seized with a bad cough. She saw one of her ladies take a pill and asked what it was. Dr. Linnaeus' prescription for a cold, she said, and it always cured her right up. So the doctor was called to the castle and his cure worked there, too. Not long after that he set down in his diary that "Now, no one can get well without my help."

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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 gra.s.s 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."

The binomial system revolutionized the science. What the lines of longitude and lat.i.tude did for geography Linnaeus' genius did for botany. And he did not let pride of achievement persuade him that he had said the last word. He knew his system to be the best till some one should find a better, and said so. The King gave him a n.o.ble name and he was proud of it with reason--vain, some have said. But vanity did not make the creature deny the Creator. He ever tried to trace science to its author. When the people were frightened by the "water turning to blood" and overzealous priests cried that it was a sign of the wrath of G.o.d, he showed under the magnifying gla.s.s the presence of innumerable little animals that gave the water its reddish tinge, and thereby gave offence to some pious souls. But over the door of his lecture room were the words in Latin: "Live guiltless--G.o.d sees you!" and in his old age, seeing with prophetic eye the day of bacteriology that dawned a hundred years after his death, he thanked G.o.d that He had permitted him to "look into His secret council room and workshop."

He was one of the clear thinkers of all days, uniting imagination with sound sense. It was Linnaeus who discovered that plants sleep like animals. The Pope ordered that his books, wherever they were found in his dominions, should be burned as materialistic and heretical; but Linnaeus lived to see a professor in botany at Rome dismissed because he did not understand his system, and another put in his place who did, and whose lectures followed his theories. When he was seventy he was stricken with apoplexy, while lecturing to his students, and the last year of his life was full of misery.

"Linnaeus limps," is one of the last entries in his diary, "can hardly walk, speaks unintelligibly, and is scarce able to write."

Death came on January 10, 1778.

Under the white flashes of the northern lights in the desolate land he explored in his youth, there grows in the shelter of the spruce forests a flower which he found and loved beyond any other, the _Linnaea borealis_, named after him. In some pictures we have of him, he is seen holding a sprig of it in his hand. It is the twin flower of the northern Pacific coast and of Labrador, indeed of the far northern woods from Labrador all the way to Alaska, that lifts its delicate, sweet-scented pink bells from the moss with gentle appeal, "long overlooked, lowly, flowering early" despite cold and storm, typical of the man himself.

NIELS FINSEN, THE WOLF-SLAYER

Hard by the town of Thorshavn, in the Faroe islands, a little lad sat one day carving his name on a rock. His rough-coated pony cropped the tufts of stunted gra.s.s within call. The grim North Sea beat upon the sh.o.r.e below. What thoughts of the great world without it stirred in the boy he never told. He came of a people to whom it called all through the ages with a summons that rarely went unheeded. If he heard he gave no sign. Slowly and laboriously he traced in the stone the letters N.R.F. When he had finished he surveyed his work with a quiet smile. "There!" he said, "that is done."

The years went by, and a distant city paused in its busy life to hearken to bells tolling for one who lay dead. Kings and princes walked behind his coffin and a whole people mourned. Yet in life he had worn no purple. He was a plain, even a poor man. Upon his grave they set a rock brought from the island in the North Sea, just like the other that stands there yet, and in it they hewed the letters N.R.F., for the man and the boy were one. And he who spoke there said for all mankind that what he wrought was well done, for it was done bravely and in love.

Niels Ryberg Finsen was born in 1860 in the Faroe islands, where his father was an official under the Danish Government. His family came of the st.u.r.dy old Iceland stock that comes down to our time unshorn of its strength from the day of the vikings, and back to Iceland his people sent him to get his education in the Reykjavik Latin school, after a brief stay in Denmark where his teachers failed to find the key to the silent, reserved lad. There he lived the seven pregnant years of boyhood and youth, from fourteen to twenty-one, and ever after there was that about him that brought to mind the wild fastnesses of that storm-swept land. Its mountains were not more rugged than his belief in the right as he saw it.

The Reykjavik school had a good name, but school and pupils were after their own kind. Conventional was hardly the word for it. Some of the "boys" were twenty and over. Finsen loved to tell of how they pursued the studies each liked best, paying scant attention to the rest. In their chosen fields they often knew much more than the curriculum called for, and were quite able to instruct the teacher; the things they cared less about they helped one another out with, so as to pa.s.s examinations. For mere proficiency in lessons they cherished a sovereign contempt. To do anything by halves is not the Iceland way, and it was not Niels Finsen's. All through his life he was impatient with second-hand knowledge and borrowed thinking. So he worked and played through the long winters of the North. In the summer vacations he roamed the barren hills, helped herd the sheep, and drank in the rough freedom of the land and its people. At twenty-one the school gave him up to the university at Copenhagen.

Training for life there was not the heyday of youthful frolicking we sometimes a.s.sociate with college life in our day and land. Not until he was thirty could he hang up his sheepskin as a physician. Yet the students had their fun and their sports, and Finsen was seldom missing where these went on. He was not an athlete because already at twenty-three the crippling disease with which he battled twenty years had got its grip on him, but all the more he was an outdoor man. He sailed his boat, and practised with the rifle until he became one of the best shots in Denmark. And it is recorded that he got himself into at least one sc.r.a.pe at the university by his love of freedom.

The country was torn up at that time by a struggle between people and government over const.i.tutional rights, and it had reached a point where a country parish had refused to pay taxes illegally a.s.sessed, as they claimed. It was their Boston tea-party. A delegation of the "tax refusers" had come to Copenhagen, where the political pot was boiling hot over the incident. The students were enthusiastic, but the authorities of the university sternly unsympathetic. The "Reds" were for giving a reception to the visitors in Regentsen, the great dormitory where, as an Iceland student, Finsen had free lodging; but it was certain that the Dean would frown upon such a proposition. So they applied innocently for permission to entertain some "friends from the country," and the party was held in Finsen's room. Great was the scandal when the opposition newspapers exploited the feasting of the tax refusers in the sacred precincts of the university. To the end of his days Finsen chuckled over the way they stole a march on the Dean.

For two or three years after getting his degree he taught in the medical school as demonstrator, eking out his scant income by tutoring students in anatomy. His sure hand and clear decision in any situation marked him as a pract.i.tioner of power, and he had thoughts once of devoting himself to the most delicate of all surgery,--that of the eye. He was even then groping for his life-work, without knowing it, for it was always light, light--the source or avenue or effect of it--that held him. And presently his work found him.

It has been said that Finsen was a sick man. A mysterious malady[1]

with dropsical symptoms clutched him from the earliest days with ever tightening grip, and all his manhood's life he was a great but silent sufferer. Perhaps it was that; perhaps it was the bleak North in which his young years had been set that turned him to the light as the source of life and healing. He said it himself: "It was because I needed it so much, I longed for it so." Probably it was both. Add to them his unique power of turning the things of everyday life to account in his scientific research, and one begins to understand at once his success and his speedy popularity. He dealt with the humble things of life, and got to the heart of things on that road. And the people comprehended; the wise men fell in behind him--sometimes a long way behind.

[Footnote 1: The autopsy which he himself ordered on his death-bed as his last contribution to medical knowledge, showed it to be a slow ossification of the membrane of the heart, involving the liver and all the vital organs. He was "tapped" for dropsy more than twenty times.]

In the yard of Regentsen there grows a famous old linden tree.

Standing at his window one day and watching its young leaf sprout, Finsen saw a cat sunning itself on the pavement. The shadow of the house was just behind it and presently crept up on p.u.s.s.y who got up, stretched herself, and moved into the sunlight. In a little while the shadow overtook her there, and p.u.s.s.y moved once more. Finsen watched the shadow rout her out again and again. It was clear that the cat liked the sunlight.

A few days later he stood upon a bridge and saw a little squad of insects sporting on the water. They drifted down happily with the stream till they came within the shadow of the bridge, when they at once began to work their way up a piece to get a fresh start for a sunlight sail. Finsen knew just how they felt. His own room looked north and was sunless; his work never prospered as it did when he sat with a friend whose room was on the south side, where the sun came in. It was warm and pleasant; but was that all? Was it only the warmth that made the birds break into song when the sun came out on a cloudy day, made the insects hum joyously and man himself walk with a more springy step? The housekeeper who "sunned" the bed-clothes and looked with suspicion on a dark room had something else in mind; the sun "disinfected" the bedding. Finsen wanted to know what it was in the sunlight that had this power, and how we could borrow it and turn it to use.

The men of science had long before a.n.a.lyzed the sunlight. They had broken it up into the rays of different color that together make the white light we see. Any boy can do it with a prism, and in the band or spectrum of red, yellow, green, blue, and violet that then appears, he has before him the cipher that holds the key to the secrets of the universe if we but knew how to read it aright; for the sunlight is the physical source of all life and of all power.

The different colors represent rays with different wave-lengths; that is, they vibrate with different speed and do different work.

The red vibrate only half as fast as the violet, at the other end of the spectrum, and, roughly speaking, they are the heat carriers. The blue and violet are cold by comparison. They are the force carriers.

They have power to cause chemical changes, hence are known as the chemical or actinic rays. It is these the photographer shuts out of his dark room, where he intrenches himself behind a ruby-colored window. The chemical ray cannot pa.s.s that; if it did it would spoil his plate.

This much was known, and it had been suggested more than once that the "disinfecting" qualities of the sunlight might be due to the chemical rays killing germs. Finsen, experimenting with earthworms, earwigs, and b.u.t.terflies, in a box covered with gla.s.s of the different colors of the spectrum, noted first that the bugs that naturally burrowed in darkness became uneasy in the blue light. As fast as they were able, they got out of it and crawled into the red, where they lay quiet and apparently content. When the gla.s.s covers were changed they wandered about until they found the red light again. The earwigs were the smartest. They developed an intelligent grasp of the situation, and soon learned to make straight for the red room. The b.u.t.terflies, on the other hand, liked the red light only to sleep in. It was made clear by many such experiments that the chemical rays, and they only, had power to stimulate, to "stir life." Finsen called it that himself. In the language of the children, he was getting "warm."