io THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINNAEUS 



gave too much study to the means.' l Dutch seemed 

 not worth learning, and he was not long in France or 

 England. One cannot do great works without leaving 

 many little works undone. * All our life must be a 

 selection, and pursuits must be neglected because we 

 have not time or mind to spare for them. So that I 

 cannot but think that shooting and fishing, in our state 

 of society, must always be indulged at the expense of 

 something better.' 2 For all his effervescent imagination 

 Linnaeus was too strong to be versatile. He walked as 

 a deaf man, and remained contentedly dumb among these 

 people, though he had invented a language. Johnson 

 himself had only coined four new words ; Linnaeus had 

 a licensed mint of his own. Linna3us created words, a 

 language. Yet the poet's calling is the greater : he creates 

 lines, proverbs, images, thoughts, for that language to 

 gather up and hold for ever; whole sentences, that, 

 passing through the language, crystallise it into imagery. 

 Such is Keats, such are greater and less than he. This 

 function of a' poet was in some measure exercised by Lin- 

 naeus himself, as well as those of an inventor and reformer. 

 The vague and barbarous technology of the time made of 

 botanical science a maze of difficulties. c It resembles a 

 chaos,' said Linnaeus, ' the mother of which is ignorance, 

 the father custom, and the fosterer prejudice.' 



' Botanists,' says Linnaeus, in his third letter to 

 Haller, June 8, 1737, ' have hitherto wholly neglected 

 the language of their science. Since Tournefort more 

 1 Diary. 2 Dr. Arnold. 



