294 THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINNAEUS 



stranger, hope for admittance ? He awaited in anxiety 

 the result of his application. l He who had lived in 

 Hamburg too high for his means, in Leyden had to live 

 low.' He was wiser and therefore humbler now. His 

 lesson in Hamburg had taught him that a novus homo 

 must not be arrogant when he enters the society of 

 the scieritocracy, and that he must not run himself 

 rashly against vested interests. Yet for all his poverty, 

 Carl Linnasus seems to have lived in intimacy with 

 the scientocrats of Leyden Van Koyen, Van Swieten, 

 Lieberkuhn, Lawson, and Gronovius. Turton shrewdly 

 says, { Among the causes which contributed to enlarge 

 the views and ripen the judgment of Linnaeus may 

 be reckoned the facility with which he made himself 

 known and regarded by the most learned men of his 

 time. Wherever he came he found a friend, and that 

 friend generally of the first reputation in the sciences 

 he studied.' 



Days passed on, and Linnaeus, having exhausted the 

 sights of the ' Athens of the West,' was on the eve of 

 leaving Leyden, when, on the eighth day after his first 

 call upon Boerhaave, he was admitted to the physician's 

 presence suddenly, and out of his turn, for several great 

 people had been waiting longer than he. Learning was 

 power here in Holland : whatever it may have been in his 

 own country, here he was not without honour. It is true 

 that in Holland, where one had only to ' invent a shovel 

 and be a magistrate,' a new theory was certain to obtain 

 respect, especially when it was about plants, which then 



