LINN^AN MEMORIAL ADDRESS 263 



was in amazement; and the author, having now been three 

 years abroad, and having made his personal impression upon 

 nearly all the botanists of London and of Paris, as well as upon 

 those of Germany and Holland, went home to Sweden, there at 

 first to suffer the adverse consequences of fame, and afterwards 

 to enjo}' its benefits. 



PRACTICES MEDICINE IN STOCKHOLM. 



To suffer, I say, the consequences of renown ; for Linnaeus 

 had now to realize the truthfulness of what was said by the 

 Great Master of long ago ; namely, that " a prophet is not with- 

 out honor, save in his own country, and in his own house." At 

 the University of Upsala now, as aforetime, there was no hope 

 of preferment for Linnaeus. His books did not as yet bring him 

 income. He must settle down to the practice of medicine ; and 

 he chose Stockholm, the capital and chief city of the kingdom. 

 There he was a stranger. Their was not one friend to recom- 

 mend him ; and, as he himself records it, no one would employ 

 him, even by committing a sick servant to his care. His sys- 

 tem of botany began also to be assailed in public vigorously and 

 tellingly. Just across that arm of the sea that separates between 

 Sweden and Russia, at St. Petersburg Professor Siegesbeck 

 had written and distributed a book in which the Linnaean system 

 of botany was arraigned severely, and with so much point that 

 many people in Sweden thought that Linnaeus had been philo- 

 sophically and botanically annihilated. He admits that he almost 

 believed that himself; and, as now the tide had set strongly in 

 his favor as a medical practioner at Stockholm, he had resolved 

 to abandon forever the service of Flora, and devote himself 

 wholly to that of ^sculapius. The latter, said Linnaeus, brings 

 all good things, while Flora rewards me only with Siegesbecks. 

 And the tide of Linnaeus's fortune in medicine rose higher. One 

 and another of the nobility became numbered among his patients, 

 and at last, the queen herself; and now, as he said in a letter 

 to a friend, no one who was ill could get well, it seemed, with- 

 out his help. 



