310 THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINN&US 



are nearly upset by the solid rays of the midnight sun ; 

 Laplanders are rushing about in wildest action with their 

 canoes, tents, and other attributes ; a reindeer coucliant 

 in the foreground supports a Laplander dining off his 

 drum. The Linncea lorealis, a dried specimen, is in the 

 right-hand corner. Linnaeus divides Lapland into two 

 regions Alpes Lapponicse and Desertum Lapponicum. 

 Preparing this work had been Carl's recreation amidst his 

 severer studies. Oppressed at times by the weight of 

 luxury around him, and by the heavy climate of Holland, 

 he revelled in the recollection of the Lapland Alps for 

 the memory of hardships had now become a pleasure. 

 Except in the immediate society of Clifford and the 

 scientific men who gathered round his table, Carl was 

 very much thrown inwards upon himself. One wonders 

 he had not shrunk narrower, thus dwelling in a small 

 coterie of persons of one turn of mind exclusively, 

 among whom he early took a leading part ; and he 

 would have done so had he not taken the whole range 

 of natural history for his province, and held fast his 

 idea of benefiting his own Sweden by his researches. 

 ' Suddenly cast,' as Gibbon phrases it, ' on a foreign 

 land, he found himself deprived of the use of speech and 

 hearing ; incapable, not only of enjoying the pleasures 

 of conversation, but even of asking or answering a 

 question in the common intercourse of life ' ; for, as of 

 old, Linnaeus, the inventor of words, never could learn 

 words for words' sake. Like our Johnson, he only 

 knew one Dutch word roes-knopies, rosebuds. ' And 



