CAROLUS LINN&US 49 



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 between Sweden and Russia, at 

 St. Petersburg Professor Siegesbeck had written 

 and distributed a book in which the Linnsean 

 system of botany was arraigned severely, and 

 with so much point that many people in Sweden 

 thought that Linnaeus had been philosophic- 

 ally and botanically annihilated. 1 He admits 



1 Referring to the attack of Siegesbeck Linnaeus, wrote thus 

 from Hartecamp to his friend Haller: "This author has been 

 very hard upon me. I wish he had written these things 

 when I was first about publishing. I might have learned 

 when young, what I am forced to learn at a more advanced 

 age, to abstain from writing, to observe others, and to hold 

 my tongue. What a fool I have been to waste so much 

 time, to spend my days and nights in a study which yields 

 no better fruit, and makes me the laughing-stock of all the 

 world! His arguments are nothing; but his book is filled 

 with exclamations such as I never before met with. Whether 

 I answer him or keep silence, my reputation must suffer. 

 He cannot understand argument. He denies the sexes of 

 plants. He charges my system with indelicacy; and yet I 

 have not written more about the polygamy of plants than 

 Swammerdam has about bees. He laughs at my characters, 

 4 



