SKETCH OF CAROL US LINNuEUS. 837 



to take with hini were soon exhausted, and he was reduced to 

 poverty, having, it is said, to wear other students' cast-off shoes, 

 or mend his own with paper, when Olaf Celsius, Professor of 

 Theology, observed his attention to botany, looked at his collec- 

 tions, and concluded that he would make a good assistant on the 

 " Hierobotanicon," a treatise on the plants of the Bible, which he 

 was preparing. He took Linnaeus to board, gave him the free use 

 of his library, found him some private pupils, and recommended 

 him to Olaf Rudbeck, Professor of Botany. Linnaeus had in the 

 mean time had his attention directed to the sexuality of plants, by 

 reading a letter from Burckhart to Leibnitz, a review of an address 

 by Vaillant, and a work by Wallin, all bearing on the subject. 

 He himself wrote a treatise on the sexes of plants, and it was this 

 that Celsius made the occasion for the introduction. Rudbeck's 

 advanced age did not permit him to attend personally to all his 

 lectures, and he made Linnaeus his deputy. The hand of the 

 struggling student, who now at last, in his twenty-fourth year, 

 saw his career taking an upward direction, was soon visible also 

 in the remodeling and restocking of the academic gardens — he 

 having become director in a place where his application to be em- 

 ployed as a subordinate had been refused a year before. 



His equivocal position at the university having become unpleas- 

 ant by reason of the jealousy it excited among the professors, 

 Linnaeus accepted a proposition from the Academy of Sciences of 

 Upsala to make a scientific exploration of Lapland. He accom- 

 plished this task in the summer of 1732, depending mostly on his 

 own resources, and, in the face of great difficulties and with no 

 little danger, accomplishing a journey of forty-six hundred Eng- 

 lish statute miles, and brought home from it valuable fruit in 

 knowledge and specimens. In 1734, after having been defeated 

 by the hostility of one of the professors in an attempt to resume 

 his lectures at Upsala, he performed, attended by seven pupils, a 

 similar exploration of Dalecarlia. While on this journey, he lect- 

 ured at Fahlun, to large audiences, and determined, at the sugges- 

 tion of Chaplain (afterward Bishop) Browalius, to attend a for- 

 eign university for the degree of M. D. This would give him a 

 position in society and science. 



Arriving at Hamburg, he exposed the spurious character of 

 a seven-headed hydra in a museum there which was composed of 

 weasels' heads artfully sewn together, and so offended the propri- 

 etor of the establishment that he was obliged to leave the city at 

 once. At Hardewijck he passed his examination, defended a the- 

 sis on the cause of intermittent fevers, and received his degree 

 from the university. At Leyden he called upon Gronovius, who, 

 upon being shown the " Systema Naturae," was so delighted with it 

 that he undertook to publish it at his own expense. The great 



