So THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINNAEUS 



the Doctor's stead ; but when he wrote a bad hand he 

 was usually sent away again. 



Besides keeping his regular herbal, Carl made ex- 

 cursions into all the neighbouring districts, exploring 

 the animal as well as the vegetable kingdoms of nature. 

 In an excursion to ' Fogels&ng, in the spring of 1728, 

 with a brother botanist, Matthias Benzelstierna, Carl 

 was attacked by an accident or malady for it seems 

 uncertain which it should be called common to the in- 

 habitants of the Baltic and Bothnian coasts. A small 

 animal is said to penetrate the skin and bury itself so 

 deeply in the flesh that it leaves only a black dot at the 

 spot where it entered. Unless immediately extracted, 

 the effect of the animal's poison is to cause inflammation 

 and gangrene with great rapidity, and death in the 

 course of a day or two, or sometimes within a few hours. 

 That this malady is indeed caused by an animal has 

 been doubted and denied by scientific men ; but Linnaeus 

 was convinced of its being so, and notwithstanding the 

 suffering he endured while a parish priest was kindly 

 acting as surgeon and extracting the substance, about 

 half-an-inch in length, from his arm, he carefully 

 examined it, and in spite of its injured appearance, 

 pronounced it to be a true vermes and called it 

 the Furia infernalis, from an idea that it realised the 

 description of the fatal powers ascribed by the ancients 

 to an imaginary animal so named.' l Linnaeus utilised 

 his mythological and other classical studies as aids in 

 1 Smith. 



