702 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
Botanica, and the Fundamenta Botanica, in the year 1736, and there 
now followed the Flora Lapponica, the Genera Plantarum, and the 
Critica Botanica, all in the year 1737, some of them issued at Amster- 
dam, others at Leyden. This represents the most wonderful begin- 
ning at botanical authorship of which there is any record. Here 
were seven learned and forceful books, two in folio and five in octavo, 
all given to the public within two years, almost a library of botany, 
and that a new botany, and so easy to comprehend, that almost any 
educated person could now acquire proficiency in botany by these 
books alone as a guide. The system was a new one, evidently a rival 
system to that of Tournefort, which had now been dominant for 
forty years. All the botanical world 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 enjoy its benefits. 
PRACTICES MEDICINE IN STOCKHOLM. 
To suffer, I say, the consequences of renown, for Linnzus had now 
to realize the truthfulness of what was said by the Great Master of 
long ago, namely, that “a prophet is not without 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 Linnzeus. 
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. There was 
not one friend to recommend him, and, as he himself records it, no 
one would employ him, even by committing a sick servant to his care. 
His system of botany began also to be assailed in public vigorously 
and tellingly. Just across that arm of the sea that separates 
Sweden and Russia, at St. Petersburg, Professor Siegesbeck had writ- 
ten and distributed a book in which the Linnean system of botany 
was arraigned severely, and with so much point that many people 
in Sweden thought that Linnezus had been philosophically and botan- 
ically annihilated. He admits that he almost believed that himself; 
and, as now the tide had set strongly in his favor as a medical prac- 
titioner at Stockholm, he had resolved to abandon forever the service 
of Flora and devote himself wholly to that of Asculapius. The 
latter, said Linneeus, brings all good things, while Flora rewards me 
only with Siegesbecks. And the tide of Linneus’s fortune in medi- 
cine 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, 
without his help. 
