256 GREENE 



ginnings of a career at that celebrated seat of learning: this, 

 however, with the stern assurance that this was all they would 

 be able to do ; that no remittances from home would be forth- 

 coming. Before the first year at Upsala was completed Lin- 

 n£eus was penniless and almost barefooted ; being obliged to line 

 his shoes with birch bark and pasteboard, and his clothing was 

 worse than threadbare. He was now in the twenty-third year 

 of his age, and in his distress he still consoled himself with stu- 

 dies botanical. In the midst of the botanic garden at Upsala he 

 sat, one autumn day, drawing up descriptions of some rare plants 

 that were in bloom. An ecclesiastic of distinguished bearing, 

 in passing through the garden paused before him, asked him 

 what he was describing, if he knew plants, was a student of 

 botany, from what part of the country he had come, and how 

 long he had been at the university, tested his knowledge of 

 botany by asking him the names of all the plants that were in 

 sight. This ecclesiastic was no less noted a personage than 

 Olaus Celsius, a man then some sixty years of age, eminent 

 as a theologian, an orientalist, and more than an amateur in the 

 natural sciences ; even now beginning to be a botanist ; for 

 some two years before the date of his chance meeting with the 

 student Linnaeus, he had been assigned by a council of Lutheran 

 clergymen the task of writing a treatise on the plants mentioned 

 in the Bible. His classic Hierobotanon was the result of his 

 attempt to fulfil that commission ; and, by the way, none will 

 ever know how largely he may have been indebted to the young 

 student Linnseus in the preparation of that work. The exam- 

 ination that he had given the youth, there in the botanic garden, 

 had filled him with wondering admiration. Celsius saw that 

 he needed him ; saw also in his worn clothing and almost bare 

 feet the evidence of a worthy student's grinding poverty. Within 

 a few days Linnaeus was comfortably housed with Professor 

 Celsius ; having been commanded to bring with him that her- 

 barium of 600 Swedish plants which he said had accumulated 

 with the last three 3'ears. 



Celsius was to write a botany of Palestine by and by, and was 

 now devoting as much time as he might to the botany that was 

 at hand, that of his own country ; and he had augmented his 



