690 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
origin and character, can not fail to be of interest to all who, on this 
his two hundredth natal day, unite in celebrating his imperishable 
fame. 
The Rev. Nils Linnzeus was no sooner married and settled in the 
charge of a parish than he began the creation of an orchard and gar- 
den, following the inspiration he had received in boyhood while under 
the benign influence of his uncle, the Rev. Sven Tiliander. When 
Nils Linneus’s garden had been four or five years established, the 
proprietor began to lead within its precincts his first-born child, a 
small white-haired boy, active and intelligent beyond the average for 
his years. Flowers, beyond all things else, were this small child’s 
delight. Even at the age of four years he knew the names of all the 
familiar kinds. On a May-day picnic excursion that the pastor gave 
the children of the parish, to a wild and beautiful spot some few 
miles away, this botanical nomenclator, that he was to be, nearly 
monopolized the pastor’s time with questions of plant names. Many 
kinds, to him until now unknown, and therefore nameless, he must 
have names for. Some of them were forgotten within an hour, and 
were brought again. The father’s patience gave way a little, and the 
threat was made that unless Master Karl Linneus was more careful 
to remember them he would get no more plant names at all. If the 
Rev. Nils Linnzeus had thought it time to begin to check his child’s 
extraordinary zeal for plant knowledge, this was the wrong way to go 
about it. That threat, though a mild one, would be sure to have the 
opposite effect. If the infant had inherited the father’s temperament, 
the matter would have been unimportant. I may rather say that, if 
the child Linnzeus had been of the father’s temperament, this restless 
activity and burning zeal, whether for plants or for anything else 
under the sun, would not have been there, and that small white-haired 
Scandinavian 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, unaggressive, unambitious, and 
even slow, if the mother be very decidedly of the opposite temperament, 
active, energetic, ambitious, ardent, and also young, strong, and in per- 
fect health. Just these conditions prevailed at the nativity of Lin- 
neus. The strong character in that household was the mother, Chris- 
tina Broderson Linneus. 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 cultured 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 
