248 GREENE 



herited the father's temperament, the matter would have been 

 unimportant. I may rather say that, if the child Linna;us had 

 been of the father's temperament, this restless activity and burn- 

 ing zeal, whether for plants or for anything else under the sun, 

 would not have been there, and that small white-haired Scandi- 

 navian child's birthday would not have been celebrated on two 

 or three continents, after two hundred years. 



If a paradox like this may be ventured, one may say that 

 the fatherhood of a great man must, in many an instance, be 

 credited to the mother. The man of power and influence may 

 have for his male parent one of quiet retiring manner, unag- 

 gressive, unambitious, and even slow, if the mother be very 

 decidedly of the opposite temperament, active, energetic, ambi- 

 tious, ardent, and also young, strong, and in perfect health. 

 Just these conditions prevailed at the nativity of Linnaeus. The 

 strong character in that household was the mother, Christina 

 Broderson Linnaeus. It is safe to infer from her antecedents 

 that she was a woman of refinement and perhaps unusual 

 mentality. She may almost be said to have had none but cul- 

 tured men among her ancestry for three generations back. We 

 have already seen that her husband was her father's successor 

 in the Stenbrohult pastorate. Her father had not only been 

 pastor there all his official life ; he had been born there, as 

 the son of the pastor whom he in turn succeeded ; so that her 

 father and her grandfather had been pastors of that parish all 

 their lives — so to speak — while the priest who preceded her 

 paternal grandfather in that same church had been her great- 

 grandfather on her mother's side. Realizing now that, when 

 in the nineteenth year of her own age Christina Linnjeus's first- 

 born arrived at the parsonage where both she and her father 

 before her had been born, where a grandfather of hers and 

 even a great-grandfather had held life-long pastorates, we 

 pardon the ambition of the young mother who set her whole 

 heart and soul upon the plan of having this her first-born trained 

 and fitted to inherit that pastorate already historical l}-^ so re- 

 markable ; of which history she could not but be proud. 



