54 THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINN^US 



CHAPTER III. 



LUND UNIVERSITY. 



Buoyantly he went. 



Again his stooping forehead was besprent 

 With dewdrops from the skirting ferns. Then wide 

 Opened the great morass, shot every side 

 With flashing water through and through ; a-shine, 

 Thick-steaming, all alive. Whose shape divine 

 Quivered i' the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced 

 Athwart the flying herons ? He advanced, 

 But warily .... 



Each footfall burst up in the marish floor 

 A diamond jet : and if he stopped to pick 

 Rose-lichen, or molest the leeches quick, 

 And circling blood-worms, minnow, newt, or loach, 

 A sudden pond would silently encroach 

 This way and that. Bordello, BROWNING. 



IN 1727, when he was just twenty, Carl Linnaeus was 

 matriculated at the university of Lund, in Sk&ne, South 

 Sweden, where his father had studied, and contended 

 with poverty for some years, but where Carl possessed 

 two relations who would be of great help to him in his 

 studies. One of these, his cousin Carl Tiliander, was 

 a student of some years' standing. 



Speaking so well and so persuasively as Carl did, 

 his mother still looked forward to his being one day a 

 preacher. She hoped much from the university. Carl 



