CAROLUS LINN^US 19 



of the parish, to a wild and beautiful spot 

 some few miles away, this botanical nomen- 

 clator that he was to be, nearly monopolized 

 the pastor's time with questions of plant 

 names. Many kinds, to him until now un- 

 known, 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 

 Linnaeus was more careful to remember them 

 he would get no more plant names at all. If 

 the Reverend Nils Linnaeus 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 Linnaeus had been of the father's tem- 

 perament, 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 cele- 

 brated on two or three continents, after two 

 hundred years. 



