Germany's sympathy for the best in thought has occasionally been broken in upon by pigmy rulers, who, for the moment, had a giant's power, so it seems hardly possible that a government which encouraged Goethe should have banished Wagner. The greatness of Kant was largely owing to the fact that he was set apart by Frederick and made free to do his work; and at this time, not another monarchy in the world would have had the insight to keep its coarse hands off this little man with the big head and the brain of a prophet.

And as Kant was the greatest and most original thinker of his time, so today does a German University house the world's greatest living scientist. Ernst Haeckel has been Professor of Natural History at Jena for forty-two years. All the efforts of various other Universities to lure him away have failed. He even declined to listen to the siren song of Major Pond, and only smiled at the big baits dangled on long poles from Cook County, Illinois.

"I have everything I want, everything I can use is right here; why should I think of uprooting my life?" he asked. And yet, Jena, there in the shadow of the Thuringian Mountains, is only a little town of less than ten thousand inhabitants.

In Nineteen Hundred Three, there were five hundred pupils registered at Jena, as against four thousand at Harvard, five thousand at Ann Arbor, and nearly the same at Lincoln, Nebraska.

It will not do to assume that those who graduate at big colleges are big men, any more than to imagine that folks who reside in big towns are bigger than those who live in little villages. Perhaps the greatest men have come from the small colleges: I believe the small colleges admit this.

And surely there is plenty of good argument handy, in way of proof; for while Harvard has her Barrett Wendell, with his caveat on clearness, force and elegance; and Ann Arbor has Cicero Trueblood, Professor of Oratory, whose official duty it is to formulate the College Yell; yet Amherst, with her scant five hundred pupils, has Professor David P. Todd, the greatest astronomer of the New World. I really wonder sometimes what a University that stands in fear of Triggsology would do with Professor Ernst Haeckel, whose disregard for tradition is very decidedly Ingersollian! The actual fact is, Ernst Haeckel, the world's greatest thinker, belongs in the little town of Jena, in Germany. At the village of Coniston, you see the little hall where Ruskin read the best things he ever wrote, to a dozen or two people.

At Hammersmith, the limit of a William Morris audience was about a hundred. At Jena, Ernst Haeckel sits secure in his little lecture-hall, and speaks or reads to fifty or sixty students, but the printed word goes to millions, so his thoughts here expressed in Jena are shots heard round the world.

American pedagogic institutions are mendicant—they depend upon private charity and are endowed by pious pirates and beneficent buccaneers. The individuals who made these institutions possible very naturally have a controlling voice in their management. The colleges in America that are not supported by direct mendicancy depend upon the dole of the legislator, and woe betide the pedagogic principal who offends the orthodox vote. His supplies are cut short, and purse-strings pucker until his voice moderates to a monotone and he dilutes his views to a dull neutral tint. I do not know a University in the United States that would not place Ernst Haeckel on half-rations, and make him fight for his life, or else he would be discharged and be reduced to the sad necessity of tilting windmills in popular lecture courses for the edification of agrarians. The German Government seeks to make men free. It even gives them the privilege of being absurd; for pioneers sometimes take the wrong track. We do not scout Columbus because his domestic voyages were failures; nor because he sought one thing and found another, and died without knowing the difference.

Haeckel's wants are all supplied; what he needs in the way of apparatus or material is his for the asking; he travels at will the round world over; visions of old age and yawning almshouses are not for him. He owns himself—he does what he wishes, he says what he thinks, and neither priest nor politician dare cry, hist! So we get the paradox: the only perfect freedom is to be found in a monarchy. "A Republic," says Schopenhauer, "is a land that is ruled by the many—that is to say, by the incompetent." But Schopenhauer, of course, knew nothing of the American primary, devised by altruistic Hibernians for the purpose of thwarting the incompetent many.

* * * * *

Ernst Haeckel was born in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four, hence he is just seventy-seven years old at this writing. His parents were plain people, neither rich nor poor—and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The greatest error one can make in life is not to be well born; failing in this, a man struggles through life under an awful handicap.

Haeckel formed the habit of steady, systematic work in youth, and untiring effort has been the rule of his life. Man was made to be well, and he was made to work. It is only work—which is the constant effort to retain equilibrium—that makes life endurable. So we find Haeckel now, at near fourscore years, a model of manly vigor, with all the eager, curious, receptive qualities of youth—a happy man, but one who knows that happiness lies on the way to Heaven, and not in arriving there and sitting down to enjoy it.

Ernst Haeckel gathers his manna fresh every day. I believe Haeckel enjoys his pipe and mug after the day's work is done; but for stimulants in a general sense, he has no use. In his book on Ceylon, he attributes his escape from the jungle fever, from which most of his party suffered, to the fact that he never used strong drink, and ate sparingly.

He is jealous of the sunshine—a great walker—works daily with hoe and spade in his garden; and breathes deeply, pounding on his chest, when going from his house to the college, in a way that causes considerable amusement among the fledglings. Tall, spare rather than stout, bronzed, active, wearing shoes with thick soles, plain gray clothes, often accompanied by a half-dozen young men, he is a common figure on the roads that wind out of Jena, and lose themselves amid the mountains.

The distinguishing feature of the man is his animation. He is full of good cheer, and acts as if he were expecting to discover something wonderful very soon.

To find the balance between play and work has been the aim of his life; and surely, he has pretty nearly discovered it.

Once when a caller asked him what he considered the greatest achievement of his life, he took out of his pocket a leather case containing a bronze medal, and proudly passed it around.

This medal was presented to him in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, in token of a running high jump—the world's record at the time, or not, as the case may be. Haeckel is essentially an out-of-door man, as opposed to the philosopher who works in a stuffy room, and grows round-shouldered over his microscope. "I may entrust laboratory analyses to others, but there is one thing I will never let another do for me, and that is take my daily walk a-field," he once said.

While lecturing he sits at a table and simply talks in a very informal way; often purposely arousing a discussion, or awakening a sleepy student with a question. Yet on occasion he can speak to a multitude, and, like Huxley, rise to the occasion. Oratory, however, he considers rather dangerous, as the speaker is usually influenced by the opinions of the audience, and is apt to grow more emphatic than exact—to generate more heat than light.

The comparison of Haeckel with Huxley is not out of place. He has been called the Huxley of Germany, just as Huxley was called the Haeckel of England. In temperament, they were much alike; although Haeckel perhaps does not use quite so much aqua fortis in his ink. Yet I can well imagine that if he were at a convention where the Bishop of Oxford would level at him a few theological spitballs, he would answer, unerringly, with a sling and a few smooth pebbles from the brook. And possibly, knowing himself, this is why he keeps out of society, and avoids all public gatherings where pseudo-science is exploited.

There is a superstition that really great men are quite oblivious of their greatness, and that the pride of achievement is not among their assets. Nothing could be wider of the mark. When Ernst Haeckel was asked, "Who is your favorite author?" he very promptly answered, "Ernst Haeckel."

His study is a big square room on the top floor of one of the college buildings; and in this room is a bookcase extending from ceiling to floor, given up to his own works.

Copies of every edition and of all translations are here.

And in a special case are the original manuscripts, solidly bound in boards, as carefully preserved as were the "literary remains" of William Morris, guarded with the instincts of a bibliophile.

Of the size of this Haeckel collection one can make a guess when it is stated that the man has written and published over fifty different books. These vary in size from simple lectures to volumes of a thousand pages. His work entitled, "The Natural History of Creation," has been translated into twelve languages, and has gone through fifteen editions in Germany, and about half as many in England.

The last book issued by Professor Haeckel was that intensely interesting essay, "The Riddle of the Universe," which was written in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-nine, in two months' time, during his summer vacation. He gave it out that he had gone to Italy, denied himself to all visitors who knew that he had not, and answered no letters. He reached his study every morning at six o'clock and locked himself in, and there he remained until eight o'clock at night. At noon one of his children brought him his lunch.

Unlike Herbert Spencer, whose later writings were all dictated—and very slowly and painstakingly at that—Haeckel writes with his own hand, and when the fit is on, he turns off manuscript at the rate of from two to four thousand words a day. In writing "The Riddle of the Universe," he took no exercise save to go up on the roof, breathing deeply and pounding his chest, varying the pounding by reaching his arms above his head and stretching. However, after a few weeks the villagers and visitors got to looking for him with opera-glasses; and he ceased going on the roof, taking his calisthenics at the open window.

This exercise of reaching and stretching until you lift yourself on tiptoe, he goes out of his way to recommend in his book on "Development," wherein he says, "There is a tendency as the years pass for the internal organs to drop, but the individual who will daily go through the motion of reaching for fruit on limbs of trees that are above his head, standing on tiptoe and slowly stretching up and up, occasionally throwing his head back and looking straight up, will of necessity breathe deeply, exercise the diaphragm, and I believe in most cases will ward off diseases and keep old age awaiting for long."

Here is a little commonsense advice given by a physician who is also a great scientist. To try it will cost you nothing—no apparatus is required—just throw open the window and reach up and up and up, first with one arm, then the other, and then both arms. "The person who does this daily for five minutes as a habit will probably have no need of a physician," adds Haeckel, and with this sage remark he dismisses the subject, branching off into an earnest talk on radiolaria.

* * * * *

Haeckel was educated for a physician and began his career by practising medicine. But his heart was not really in the work; he soon arrived at the very sane conclusion that constant dwelling on the pathological was not worth while. "Hereafter I'll devote my time to the normal, not the abnormal and distempered. The sick should learn to keep well," he wrote a friend.

And again, "If an individual is so lacking in will that he can not provide for himself, then his dissolution is no calamity to either himself, the State or the race." This was written in his twenties, and seems to sound rather sophomorish, but the idea of the boy is still with the old man, for in "The Riddle of the Universe" he says, "The final effect upon the race by the preservation of the unfit, through increased skill in surgery and medicine, is not yet known." In another place he throws in a side remark, thus: "Our almshouses, homes for imbeciles, and asylums where the hopelessly insane often outlive their keepers, may be a mistake, save as these things minister to the spirit of altruism which prompts their support. Let a wiser generation answer!"

Doubtless Haeckel could make a good argument in favor of the doctors if he wished, but probably if asked to do so his answer would paraphrase Robert Ingersoll, when that gentleman was taken to task for unfairness towards Moses, "Young man, you seem to forget that I am not the attorney of Moses—don't worry, there are more than ten millions of men looking after his case." Ernst Haeckel is not the attorney for either the doctors or the clergy.

It was Darwin and "The Origin of Species" that tipped the beam for Haeckel in favor of science. Very shortly after Darwin's great book was issued, in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, a chance copy of the work fell into the hands of our young physician. He read and spoke English, and in a general way was interested in biology.

As he read of Darwin's observations and experiments the heavens seemed to open before him.

Things he had vaguely felt, Darwin stated, and thoughts that had been his, Darwin expressed. "I might have written much of this book, myself," he said.

The love of Nature had been upon the young man almost from his babyhood. All children love flowers and mix easily with the wonderful things that are found in woods and fields. At twelve years of age Ernst had formed a goodly herbarium, and was making a collection of bugs, and not knowing their names or even that they had names, he began naming them himself. Later it came to him with a shock of surprise and disappointment that the bugs and beetles had already had the attention of scholars. But he got even by declaring that he would hunt out some of the tiny things the scholars had overlooked and classify them. Every man imagines himself the first man, and to think that he is Adam and that he has to go forth, get acquainted with things and name them, reveals the true bent of the scientist.

Doctor Haeckel was ripe for Darwin's book. He was looking for it, and it took only a slight jolt to dislodge him from the medical profession and allow the Law of Affinity to do the rest.

Wallace had written Darwin's book under another name, and if these men had not written it, Haeckel surely would, for it was all packed away in his heart and head. As Darwin had studied and classified the Cirripedia, so would he write an essay on Rhizopods. Luck was with him—luck is always with the man of purpose. He had an opportunity to travel through Italy as medical caretaker to a rich invalid. Sickness surely has its uses; and rich invalids are not wholly a mistake on the part of Setebos. Haeckel secured the leisure and the opportunity to round up his Rhizopods.

He presented the work to the University of Jena, because this was the University that Goethe attended, and the gods of Haeckel were three—Goethe, Darwin and Johannes Muller.

Muller was instructor in Zoology at Berlin, a man quite of the Agassiz type who made himself beloved by the boys because he was what he was—a boy in heart, with a man's head and the soul of a saint. Some one said of Muller, "To him every look into a microscope was a service to God." In his reverent attitude he was like Linnaeus, who fell on his knees on first beholding the English gorse in full flower, and thanked Heaven that such a moment of divine joy was his.

Muller was a Jena man, too, and he gave Haeckel letters to the bigwigs. The wise men of Jena discovered that there was merit in Haeckel's discoveries.

Original investigators are rare—most of us write about the men who have done things, or else we tell about what they have done, and so we reach greatness by hitching our wagon to a star. For the essay on Rhizopods, Haeckel was made Professor Extraordinary of the University of Jena. This was in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-two; Haeckel was then twenty-eight years old; there he is today, after a service of forty-nine years.

* * * * *

Haeckel is married, with a big brood of children and grandchildren about him. Some of his own children and the grandchildren are about the same age, for Haeckel has two broods, having had two wives, both of whom sympathized with the Teddine philosophy.

With the whole household, including servants, the great scientist is on terms of absolute good camaraderie. The youngsters ride on his back; the older girls decorate him with garlands; the boys work with him in the garden, or together they tramp the fields and climb the hills.

But when it comes to study he goes to his own room in the Zoology Building, enters in and locks the door. When he travels he travels alone, without companion or secretary. Travel to him means intense work; and intense work means to him intense pleasure. Solitude seems necessary to close, consecutive thinking; and in the solitude of travel, through jungle, forest, crowded city, or across wide oceans, Haeckel finds his true and best self. Then it is that he puts his soul in touch with the Universal and realizes most fully Goethe's oft-repeated dictum, "All is one." And, indeed, to Goethe must be given the credit of preparing the mind of Haeckel for Darwinism.

In his book, "The Freedom and Science of Teaching," Haeckel applies the poetic monistic ideas of Goethe to biology and then to sociology. "All is one." And this oneness that everywhere exists is simply a differentiation of the original single cell.

The evolution of the cell mirrors the evolution of the species: the evolution of the individual mirrors the evolution of the race.

This law, expressed by Goethe, is the controlling shibboleth in all Haeckel's philosophy.

In embryology he has proved it to the satisfaction of the scientific world. When he applies it to sociology our Bellamys are looking backward to Sir Thomas More, and expect a sudden transformation to a Utopia, not unlike the change which the good old preachers used to tell us we would experience "in the twinkling of an eye."

Haeckel builds on Darwin and shows that as the Cirripedia which makes the bottom of the ocean, the coral "insect" which rears dangerous reefs and even mountain-ranges, and Rhizopods that make the chalk cliffs possible, did not change the earth's crust in the twinkling of an eye, so neither can the efforts of man instantly change the social condition. Souls do not make lightning changes. Karl Marx thought society would change in the twinkling of a ballot, but he was not a Monist, and therefore did not realize that humanity is a solidarity of souls, evolved from very lowly forms and still slowly ascending.

And the beauty of it is that the Marxians are helping the race to ascend, by supplying it an Ideal, even if they fail utterly to work their lightning change. In the end there is no defeat for any man or any thing. When men deserve the Ideal they will get it. So long as they prefer beer, tobacco, brawls and slums, these things will be supplied. When they get enough of these, something better will be evolved. The stupidity of George the Third was a necessary factor in the evolution of freedom for America. All is one; all is Good; and all is God.

The Marxians will eventually win, but by Fabian methods, and Socialism will come under another name. As opposed to Herbert Spencer, Haeckel does not admit the Unknowable, although, of course, he realizes the unknown. No man ever had a fuller faith, and if there is any such thing as a glorious deathbed it must come to men of this type who believe not only that all is well for themselves, but for every one else. How a deathbed could be "glorious" for a man who had perfect faith in his own salvation and an equally perfect faith in the damnation of most everybody else, is difficult to understand.

A true Monist would rather be in Hell asking for water than in Heaven denying it.

He loves humanity because he is Humanity, and he loves God because he is God. As a single drop of water mirrors the globe, so does a single man mirror the race. And the evolution, biological and sociological, of the man mirrors the evolution of the species.

When one once grasps the beauty and splendor of the monistic idea, how mean and small become all those little, fearsome "schemes of salvation," whereby men were to be separated and impassable gulfs fixed between them. Those who fix gulfs here and now are hotly intent on showing that God will fix gulfs hereafter; thus we see how man is continually creating God in his own image.

His idea of God's justice is always built on his own; and as usually our deities are more or less inherited, heirlooms of the past, we see that it is not at all strange that men should be better than their religion. They drag their dead creeds behind them like a stagecoach, with preachers and priests on top; kings and nobles inside; and coffins full of past sins in the boot. A man is always better than his creed—unless he makes his creed new every day. These hand-me-down religions seldom fit, and professional theology, it seems to me, is mostly a dealing in ol' clo'.

* * * * *

In the month of September, Nineteen Hundred Four, Haeckel was a delegate to the Freethinkers' Congress at Rome. To hold such a convention in the Eternal City, right under the eaves of the Vatican, was surely a trifle "indelicate," to use the words of the Pope. And it was no wonder that at the close of the Congress the Pope at once ordered a sacred housecleaning, a divine fumigation.

Forty years ago he would have acted before the Congress convened, and not afterward. Special mass was held in every one of the Catholic Churches in Rome, "partially to atone for the insult done to Almighty God."

Over three thousand delegates were present at the Congress, every civilized country being represented.

A committee was named to decorate the statue of Bruno that stands on the spot where he was burned for declaring that the earth revolved, and that the stars were not God's jewels hung in the sky each night by angels.

On this occasion, Haeckel said:

"This Congress is historic. It marks a white milepost in the onward and upward march of Freedom.

"We have met in Rome not accidentally or yet incidentally, but purposely. We have met here to show the world that times have changed, that the earth revolves, and to prove to ourselves in an impressive and undeniable way that the power of superstition is crippled, and at last Science and Free Speech need no longer cringe and crawl. We respect the Church for what she is, but our manhood must now realize that it is no longer the slave and tool of entrenched force and power that abrogates to itself the name of religion."

The Haeckel attitude of mind is essentially one of faith—Haeckel's hope for the race is sublime. There are several things we do not know, but we may know some time, just as men know things that children do not.

And yet we are only children in the kindergarten of God. And this garden where we work and play is our own. The boy of ten, or even the man of sixty, may never know, but there will come men greater than these and they will understand. The Monist, the man who believes in the One—the All—is essentially religious.

Haeckel has chosen this word Monism, as opposed to theism, deism, materialism, spiritism.

Doctor Paul Carus is today the ablest American exponent of Monism, and to him it is a positive religion. If Monism could make men of the superb mental type of Paul Carus, well might we place the subject on a compulsory basis and introduce it into our public schools. But Haeckel and Carus believe quite as much in freedom as in Monism. All violence of direction is contrary to growth, and delays evolution just that much.

The One of which we are part and particle—single cells, if you please—is constantly working for its own good. We advance individually as we lie low in the Lord's hand and allow ourselves to be receivers and conveyors of the Divine Will.

And we ourselves are the Divine Will. The contemplation of this divinity excites the religious emotions of awe, veneration, wonder and of worship. It is a world of correlation. The All is right here. There is no outside force or energy; no god or supreme being that looks on, interferes, dictates and decides. To admit that there is an outside power, something uncorrelated, is to invite fear, apprehension, uncertainty and terror. This undissolved residuum is the nest-egg of superstition. The man who believes that God is the Whole, and that every man is a necessary part of the Whole, has no need to placate or please an intangible Something. All he has to do is to be true to his own nature, to live his own life, to understand himself. This takes us back to the Socratic maxim, "Know Thyself." No man ever expressed one phase of Monism so well and beautifully as Emerson has in his "Essay on Compensation." This intelligence in which we are bathed rights every wrong, equalizes every injustice, balances every perversion, punishes the wrong and rewards the right. The Universe is self-lubricating and automatic. The Greeks clearly beheld the sublime truths of Compensation when they pictured Nemesis. It is absurd to punish—leave it to Nemesis—she never forgets—nothing can escape her.

Our duties lie in service to ourselves, and we best serve self by serving humanity. This is the only religion that pays compound interest to both borrower and lender. Worship Humanity and you honor yourself.

And the world has ever dimly perceived this, for history honors no men save those who have given their lives that others might live. The saviors of the world are only those who loved Humanity more than all else. All men who live honest lives are saviors—they live that others may live.

He that saveth his life shall lose it.

We grow through radiation, not by absorption or annexation. To him that hath shall be given. We keep things by giving them to others. The dead carry in their clenched hands only that which they have given away; and the living carry only the love in their hearts which they have bestowed on others.

"I and my Father are one"—the thought is old, but to prove it from the so-called material world through the study of biology has been the life-work of Ernst Haeckel.

Undaunted we press ever on.



LINNAEUS

When a man of genius is in full swing, never contradict him, set him straight or try to reason with him. Give him a free field. A listener is sure to get a greater quantity of good, no matter how mixed, than if the man is thwarted. Let Pegasus bolt—he will bring you up in a place you know nothing about!

—Linnaeus

LINNAEUS

Out of the mist and fog of time, the name of Aristotle looms up large. It was more than twenty-three hundred years ago that Aristotle lived. He might have lived yesterday, so distinctively modern was he in his method and manner of thought. Aristotle was the world's first scientist. He sought to sift the false from the true—to arrange, classify and systematize.

Aristotle instituted the first zoological garden that history mentions, barring that of Noah. He formed the first herbarium, and made a geological collection that prophesied for Hugh Miller the testimony of the rocks. Very much of our scientific terminology goes back to Aristotle.

Aristotle was born in the mountains of Macedonia. His father was a doctor and belonged to the retinue of King Amyntas. The King had a son named Philip, who was about the same age as Aristotle.

Some years later, Philip had a son named Alexander, who was somewhat unruly, and Philip sent a Macedonian cry over to Aristotle, and Aristotle harkened to the call for help and went over and took charge of the education of Alexander.

The science of medicine in Aristotle's boyhood was the science of simples. In surgery the world has progressed, but in medicine, doctors have progressed most, by consigning to the grave, that tells no tales, the deadly materia medica.

In Aristotle's childhood, when his father was both guide and physician to the king, on hunting trips through the mountains, the doctor taught the boys to recognize sarsaparilla, stramonium, hemlock, hellebore, sassafras and mandrake. Then Aristotle made a list of all the plants he knew and wrote down the supposed properties of each.

Before Aristotle was half-grown, both his father and mother died, and he was cared for by a Mr. and Mrs. Proxenus. This worthy couple would never have been known to the world were it not for the fact that they ministered to this orphan boy. Long years afterward he wrote a poem to their memory, and paid them such a tender, human compliment that their names have been woven into the very fabric of letters. "They loved each other, and still had love enough left for me," he says. And we can only guess whether this man and his wife with hearts illumined by divine passion, the only thing that yet gladdens the world, ever imagined that they were supplying an atmosphere in which would bud and blossom one of the greatest intellects the world has ever known.

It was through the help of Proxenus that Aristotle was enabled to go to Athens and attend the School of Oratory, of which Plato was dean.

The fine, receptive spirit of this slender youth evidently brought out from Plato's heart the best that was packed away there.

Aristotle was soon the star scholar. To get much out of school you have to take much with you when you go there. In one particular, especially, Aristotle, the country boy from Macedonia, brought much to Plato—and this was the scientific spirit. Plato's bent was philosophy, poetry, rhetoric—he was an artist in expression.

"Know thyself," said Socrates, the teacher of Plato.

"Be thyself," said Plato. "Know the world of Nature, of which you are a part," said Aristotle; "and you will be yourself and know yourself without thought or effort. The things you see, you are."

Twenty-three years Aristotle and Plato were together, and when they separated it was on the relative value of science and poetry. "Science is vital," said Aristotle; "but poetry and rhetoric are incidental." It was a little like the classic argument still carried on in all publishing-houses, as to which is the greater: the man who writes the text or the man who illustrates it.

One is almost tempted to think that Plato's finest product was Aristotle, just as Sir Humphry Davy's greatest discovery was Michael Faraday. One fine, earnest, receptive pupil is about all any teacher should expect in a lifetime, but Plato had at least two, Aristotle and Theophrastus. And Theophrastus dated his birth from the day he met Aristotle.

Theo-Phrastus means God's speech, or one who speaks divinely. The boy's real name was Ferguson. But the name given by Aristotle, who always had a passion for naming things, stuck, and the world knows this superbly great man as Theophrastus.

Botany dates from Theophrastus. And Theophrastus it was who wrote that greatest of acknowledgments, when, in dedicating one of his books, he expressed his indebtedness in these words: "To Aristotle, the inspirer of all I am or hope to be."

* * * * *

After Theophrastus' death the science of botany slept for three hundred years. During this interval was played in Palestine that immortal drama which so profoundly influenced the world. Twenty-three years after the birth of Christ, Pliny, the Naturalist, was born.

He was the uncle of his nephew, and it is probable that the younger man would have been swallowed in oblivion, just as the body of the older one was covered by the eager ashes of Vesuvius, were it not for the fact that Pliny the Elder had made the name deathless.

Pliny the Younger was about such a man as Richard Le Gallienne; Pliny the Elder was like Thomas A. Edison.

At twenty-two, Pliny the Elder was a Captain in the Roman Army doing service in Germany. Here he made memoranda of the trees, shrubs and flowers he saw, and compared them with similar objects he knew at home. "Animal and vegetable life change as you go North and South; from this I assume that life is largely a matter of temperature and moisture." Thus wrote this barbaric Roman soldier, who thereby proved he was not so much of a barbarian after all. When he was twenty-five, his command was transferred to Africa, and here, in the moments stolen from sleep, he wrote a work in three volumes on education, entitled, "Studiosus."

In writing the book he got an education—to find out about a thing, write a book on it. Pliny returned to Rome and began the practise of law, and developed into a special pleader of marked power. He still held his commission in the army, and was sent on various diplomatic errands to Spain, Africa, Germany, Gaul and Greece. If you want things done, call on a busy man: the man of leisure has no spare time.

Pliny's jottings on natural history very soon resolved themselves into the most ambitious plan, which up to that time had not been attempted by man—he would write out and sum up all human knowledge.

The next man to try the same thing was Alexander von Humboldt. We now have Pliny's "Natural History" in thirty-seven volumes. His other forty volumes are lost. The first volume of the "Natural History," which was written last, gives a list of the authors consulted. Aristotle and Theophrastus take the places of honor, and then follow a score of names of men whose works have perished and whom we know mostly through what Pliny says about them. So not only does Pliny write science as he saw it, but introduces us into a select circle of authors whom otherwise we would not know. We have the world of Nature, but we would not have this world of thinkers, were it not for Pliny.

Pliny even quotes Sappho, who loved and sung, and whose poems reached us only through scattered quotations, as if Emerson's works should perish and we would revive him through a file of "The Philistine" magazine. Pliny and Paul were contemporaries. Pliny lived at Rome when Paul lived there in his own hired house, but Pliny never mentioned him, and probably never heard of him.

One man was interested in this world, the other in the next.

Pliny begins his great work with a plagiarism on Lyman Abbott, "There is but one God." The idea that there were many arose out of the thought that because there were many things, there must be special gods to look after them: gods of the harvest, gods of the household, gods of the rain, etc.

There is but one God, says Pliny, and this God manifests Himself in Nature. Nature and Nature's work are one. This world and all other worlds we see or can think of are parts of Nature. If there are other Universes, they are natural; that is to say, a part of Nature. God rules them all according to laws which He Himself can not violate. It is vain to supplicate Him, and absurd to worship Him, for to do these things is to degrade Him with the thought that He is like us. The assumption that God is very much like us is not complimentary to God.

God can not do an unnatural or a supernatural thing. He can not kill Himself. He can not make the greater less than the less. He can not make twice ten anything else than twenty.

He can not make a stick that has but one end. He can not make the past, future. He can not make one who has lived never to have lived. He can not make the mortal, immortal; nor the immortal, mortal. He can change the form of things, but He can not abolish a thing. Pliny preaches the Unity of the Universe and his religion is the religion of Humanity.

Pliny says:

"We can not injure God, but we can injure man. And as man is part of Nature or God, the only way to serve God is to benefit man. If we love God, the way to reveal that love is in our conduct toward our fellows."

Pliny was close upon the Law of the Correlation of Forces, and he almost got a glimpse of the Law of Attraction or Gravitation. He sensed these things, but could not prove them. Pliny touched life at an immense number of points. What he saw, he knew, but when he took things on the word of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville (for these gentlemen adventurers have always lived), he fell into curious errors. For instance, he tells of horses in Africa that have wings, and when hard pressed, fly like birds; of ostriches that give milk, and of elephants that live on land or sea equally well; of mines where gold is found in solid masses and the natives dig into it for diamonds.

But outside of these little lapses, Pliny writes sanely and well. Book Two treats of the crust of the earth, of earthquakes, meteors, volcanoes (these had a strange fascination for him), islands and upheavals.

Books Three and Four relate of geography and give amusing information about the shape of the continents and the form of the earth. Then comes a book on man, his evolution and physical qualities, with a history of the races.

Next is a book on Zoology, with a resume of all that was written by Aristotle, and with many corroborations of Thompson-Seton and Rudyard Kipling. Facts from the "Jungle Book" are here recited at length. Book Nine is on marine life—sponges, shells and coral insects. Book Ten treats of birds, and carries the subject further than it had ever been taken before, even if it does at times contradict John Burroughs. Book Eleven is on insects, bugs and beetles, and tells, among other things, of bats that make fires in caves to keep themselves warm. Book Twelve is on trees, their varieties, height, age, growth, qualities and distribution. Book Thirteen treats of fruits, juices, gums, wax, saps and perfumes. Book Fourteen is on grapes and the making of wine, with a description of the process and the various kinds of wine, their effects on the human system, with a goodly temperance lesson backed up by incidents and examples.

Book Fifteen treats of pomegranates, apples, plums, peaches, figs and various other luscious fruits, and shows much intimate and valuable knowledge. And so the list runs down through, treating at great length of bees, fishes, woods, iron, lead, copper, gold, marble, fluids, gases, rivers, swamps, seas, and a thousand and one things that were familiar to this marvelous man. But of all subjects, Pliny shows a much greater love for botany than for anything else. Plants, flowers, vines, trees and mosses interest him always, and he breaks off other subjects to tell of some flower that he has just discovered.

Pliny had command of the Roman fleet that was anchored in the bay off Pompeii, when that city was destroyed in the year Seventy-nine. Bulwer-Lytton tells the story, with probably a close regard for the facts. The sailors, obeying Pliny's orders, did their utmost to save human life, and rescued hundreds. Pliny himself made various trips in a small boat from the ship to the beach. He was safely on board the flag-ship, and orders had been given to weigh anchor, when the commander decided to make one more visit to the perishing city to see if he could not rescue a few more, and also to get a closer view of Nature in a tantrum.

He rowed away into the fog. The sailors waited for their beloved commander, but waited in vain. He had ventured too close to the flowing lava, and was suffocated by the fumes, a victim to his love for humanity and his desire for knowledge. So died Pliny the Elder, aged but fifty-six years.

* * * * *

All children are zoologists, but a botanist appears upon the earth only at rare intervals.

A Botanist is born—not made. From the time of Pliny, botany performed the Rip Van Winkle act until John Ray, the son of a blacksmith, appeared upon the scene in England. In the meantime, Leonardo had classified the rocks, recorded the birds, counted the animals and written a book of three thousand pages on the horse. Leonardo dissected many plants, but later fell back upon the rose for decorative purposes.

John Ray was born in Sixteen Hundred Twenty-eight near Braintree in Essex. Now, as to genius—no blacksmith-shop is safe from it. We know where to find ginseng, but genius is the secret of God.

A blacksmith's helper by day, this aproned lad with sooty face dreamed dreams. Evenings he studied Greek with the village parson. They read Aristotle and Theophrastus.

Have a care there, you Macedonian miscreant, dead two thousand years, you are turning this boy's head!

John Ray would be a botanist as great as Aristotle, and he would speak divinely, just as did Theophrastus. It is all a matter of desire! Young Ray became a Minor Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; then a Major Fellow; then he took the Master's degree; next he became lecturer on Greek; and insisted that Aristotle was the greatest man the world had ever seen, except none, and the Dean raised an eyebrow.

The professor of mathematics resigned and Ray took his place; next he became Junior Dean, and then College Steward; and according to the custom of the times he used to preach in the chapel. One of his sermons was from the text, "Consider the lilies of the field." Another sermon that brought him more notoriety than fame was on the subject, "God in Creation," wherein he argued that to find God we should look for Him more in the world of Nature and not so much in books.

Matters were getting strained. Ray was asked to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity, which was a promise that he would never preach anything that was not prescribed by the Church. Ray demurred, and begged that he be allowed to go free and preach anything he thought was truth—new truth might come to him! This shows the absurdity of Ray. He was asked to reconsider or resign. He resigned—resigned the year that Sir Isaac Newton entered.

Fortunately, one particular pupil followed him, not that he loved college less, but that he loved Ray more. This pupil was Francis Willughby. Through the bounty of this pupil we get the scientist—otherwise, Ray would surely have been starved into subjection. Willughby took Ray to the home of his parents, who were rich people.

Ray undertook the education of young Willughby, very much as Aristotle took charge of Alexander. Willughby and Ray traveled, studied, observed and wrote. They went to Spain, took trips to France, Italy and Switzerland, and journeyed to Scotland. Willughby devoted his life to Ornithology and Ichthyology and won a deathless place in science.

Ray specialized on botany, and did a work in classification never done before. He made a catalog of the flora of England that wrung even from Cambridge a compliment—they offered him the degree of LL.D. Ray quietly declined it, saying he was only a simple countryman, and honors or titles would be a disadvantage, tending to separate him from the plain people with whom he worked. However, the Royal Society elected him a member, and he accepted the honor, that he might put the results of his work on record. His paper on the circulation of sap in trees was read before the Royal Society, on the request of Newton. Due credit was given Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood; but Ray made the fine point that man was brother to the tree, and his life was derived from the same Source.

When Willughby died, in Sixteen Hundred Seventy-two, he left Ray a yearly income of three hundred dollars. Doctor Johnson told Boswell that Ray had a collection of twenty thousand English bugs. Our botanical terminology comes more from John Ray than from any other man. Ray adopted wherever possible the names given by Aristotle, so loyal, loving and true was he to the Master. Ray died in Seventeen Hundred Five, aged seventy-six.

* * * * *

Two years after the death of John Ray, in Seventeen Hundred Seven, was born a baby who was destined to find biology a chaos, and leave it a cosmos.

Linnaeus did for botany what Galileo had done for astronomy. John Ray was only a John the Baptist.

Carl von Linne, or Carolus Linnaeus as he preferred to be called, was born in an obscure village in the Province of Smaland, Sweden. His father was a clergyman, passing rich on forty pounds a year. His mother was only eighteen years old when she bore him, and his father had just turned twenty-one. It was a poor parish, and one of the deacons explained that they could not afford a real preacher; so they hired a boy.

Carl tells in his journal, of remembering how, when he was but four years old, his father would lead his congregation out through the woods and, all seated on the grass, the father would tell the people about the plants and herbs and how to distinguish them.

Back of the parsonage there was a goodly garden, where the young pastor and his wife worked many happy hours. When Carl was eight years of age, a corner of this garden was set apart for his very own.

He pressed into his service several children of the neighborhood, and they carried flat stones from the near-by brook to wall in this miniature farm—this botanical garden.

The child that hasn't a flowerbed or a garden of its ownest own is being cheated out of its birthright.

The evolution of the child mirrors the evolution of the race. And as the race has passed through the savage, pastoral and agricultural stages, so should the child. As a people we are now in the commercial or competitive stage, but we are slowly emerging out of this into the age of co-operation or enlightened self-interest.

It is only a very great man—one with a prophetic vision—who can see beyond the stage in which he is.

The stage we are in seems the best and the final one—otherwise, we would not be in it. But to skip any of these stages in the education or evolution of the individual seems a sore mistake. Children hedged and protected from digging in the dirt develop into "third rounders," as our theosophic friends would say, that is, educated non-comps—vast top-head and small cerebellum—people who can explain the unknowable, but who do not pay cash. Third rounders all—fit only for the melting-pot!

A tramp is one who has fallen a victim of arrested development and never emerged from the nomadic stage; an artistic dilettante is one who has jumped the round where boys dig in the dirt and has evolved into a missnancy.

Young Carl Linnaeus skipped no round in his evolution. He began as a savage, robbing birds' nests, chasing butterflies, capturing bees, bugs and beetles. He trained goats to drive, hitched up a calf, fenced his little farm, and planted it with strange and curious crops.

Clergymen once were the only schoolteachers, and in Sweden, when Linnaeus was a boy, there was a plan of farming children out among preachers that they might be educated. Possibly this plan of having some one besides the parents teach the lessons is good—I can not say. But young Carl did not succeed—save in disturbing the peace among the households of the half-dozen clergymen who in turn had him.

The boy evidently was a handsome fellow, a typical Swede, with hair as fair as the sunshine, blue eyes, and a pink face that set off the fair hair and made him look like a Circassian.

He had energy plus, and the way he cluttered up the parsonages where he lodged was a distraction to good housewives: birds' nests, feathers, skins, claws, fungi, leaves, flowers, roots, stalks, rocks, sticks and stones—and when one meddled with his treasures, there was trouble. And there was always trouble; for the boy possessed a temper, and usually had it right with him.

The intent of the parents was that Carl should become a clergyman, but his distaste for theology did not go unexpressed. So perverse and persistent were his inclinations that they preyed on the mind of his father, who quoted King Lear and said, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!"

His troubles weighed so upon the good clergyman that his nerves became affected and he went to the neighboring town of Wexio to consult Doctor Rothman, a famed medical expert.

The good clergyman, in the course of his conversation with the doctor, told of his mortification on account of the dulness and perversity of his son.

Doctor Rothman listened in patience and came to the conclusion that young Mr. Linnaeus was a good boy who did the wrong thing. All energy is God's, but it may be misdirected. A boy not good enough for a preacher might make a good doctor—an excess of virtue is not required in the recipe for a physician.

"I'll cure you, by taking charge of your boy," said Rothman; "you want to make a clergyman of the youth: I'll let him be just what he wants to be, a naturalist and a physician." And it was so.

* * * * *

The year spent by Linnaeus under the roof of Doctor Rothman was a pivotal point in his life. He was eighteen years old. The contempt of Rothman for the refinements of education appealed to the young man. Rothman was blunt, direct, and to the point: he had a theory that people grew by doing what they wanted to do, not by resisting their impulses.

He was both friend and comrade to the boy. They rode together, dissected animals and plants, and the young man assisted in operations. Linnaeus had the run of the Doctor's library, and without knowing it, was mastering physiology.

"I would adopt him as my son," said Rothman; "but I love him so much that I am going to separate him from me. My roots have struck deep in the soil: I am like the human trees told of by Dante; but the boy can go on!"

And so Rothman sent him along to the University of Lund, with letters to another doctor still more cranky than himself. This man was Doctor Kilian Stobaeus, a medical professor, physician to the king, and a naturalist of note. Stobaeus had a mixed-up museum of minerals, birds, fishes and plants.

Everybody for a hundred miles who had a curious thing in the way of natural history sent it to Stobaeus. Into this medley of strange and curious things Linnaeus was plunged with orders to "straighten it up." There was a German student also living with the doctor, working for his board. Linnaeus took the lead and soon had the young German helping him catalog the curios.

The spirit of Ray had gotten abroad in Germany, and Ray's books had been translated and were being used in many of the German schools. Linnaeus made a bargain with the German student that they should speak only German—he wanted to find what was locked up in those German books on botany.

Stobaeus was lame and had but one eye, so he used to call on the boys to help him, not only to hitch up his horse, but to write his prescriptions. Linnaeus wrote very badly, and was chided because he did not improve his penmanship, for it seems that in the olden times physicians wrote legibly. Linnaeus resented the rebuke, and was shown the door. He was gone a week, when Stobaeus sent for him, much to his relief. This little comedy was played several times during the year, through what Linnaeus afterward acknowledged as his fault. One would hardly think that the man who on first seeing the English gorse in full bloom fell on his knees, burst into tears of joy, and thanked God that he had lived to see this day, would have had a fiery temper. Then further, the gentle, spiritual qualities that Linnaeus in his later life developed give one the idea that he was always of a gentle nature.

In indexing the museum of Doctor Stobaeus, Linnaeus found his bent. "I will never be a doctor," he said; "but I can beat the world on making a catalog."

And thus it was: his genius lay in classification. "He indexed and catalogued the world," a great writer has said.

After a year at the University of Lund, with more learned by working for his board than at school, there was a visit from Doctor Rothman, who had just dropped in to see his old friend Stobaeus. The fact was, Rothman cared a deal more for Linnaeus than he did for Stobaeus. "Weeds develop into flowers by transplanting only," said Rothman to Linnaeus. "You need a different soil—get out of here before you get pot-bound."

"But about Cyclops?" asked Linnaeus.

"Let Cyclops go to the devil!" It was no use to ask permission of Stobaeus. Linnaeus was so valuable that Stobaeus would not spare him.

So Linnaeus packed up and departed between the dawn and the day, leaving a letter stating he had gone to Upsala because it seemed best and begging forgiveness for such seeming ingratitude.

When Linnaeus got to Upsala he found a letter from Doctor Cyclops, written in wrath, requesting him never again to show his face in Lund. Rothman also lost the friendship of Stobaeus for his share in the transaction.

* * * * *

When Linnaeus arrived at Upsala he had one marked distinction, according to his own account—he was the poorest student that had ever knocked at the gates of the University for admittance. Perhaps this is a mistake, for even though the young man had patched his shoes with birch bark, he was not in debt.

And the youth of twenty-one who has health, hope, ambition and animation is not to be pitied. Poverty is only for the people who think poverty.

It is five hundred English miles from Lund to Upsala. After his long, weary tramp, Linnaeus sat on the edge of the hill and looked down at the scattered town of Upsala in the valley below. A stranger passing by pointed out the college buildings, where a thousand young men were being drilled and disciplined in the mysteries of learning. "Where is the Botanical Garden?" asked the newcomer.

It was pointed out to him. He gazed on the site, carefully studied the surrounding landscape, and mentally calculated where he would move the Botanical Garden as soon as he had control of it. Let us anticipate here just long enough to explain that the Upsala Botanical Garden now is where Linnaeus said it should be. It is a most beautiful place, lined off with close-growing shrubbery. After traversing the winding paths, one reaches the lecture-hall, built after the Greek, with porches, peristyle and gently ascending marble steps. On entering the building, the first object that attracts the visitor is the life-size statue of Linnaeus.

To the left, a half-mile away, is the old cathedral—a place that never much interested Linnaeus. But there now rests his dust, and in windows and also in storied bronze his face, form and fame endure. In the meantime, we have left the young man sitting on a boulder looking down at the town ere he goes forward to possess it.

He adjusts his shoes with their gaping wounds, shakes the dust from his cap, and then takes from his pack a faded neckscarf, puts it on and he is ready.

Descending the hill he forgets his lameness, waives the stone-bruises, and walks confidently to the Botanical Garden, which he views with a critical eye. Next, he inquires for the General Superintendent who lives near. The young man presents his credentials from Rothman, who describes the youth as one who knows and loves the flowers, and who can be useful in office or garden and is not above spade and hoe. The Superintendent looks at the pink face, touched with bronze from days in the open air, notes the long yellow hair, beholds the out-of-door look of fortitude that comes from hard and plain fare, and inwardly compares these things with the lack of them in some of his students. "But this Doctor—Doctor Rothman who wrote this letter—I do not have the honor of knowing him," says the Superintendent.

"Ah, you are unfortunate," replies the youth; "he is a very great man, and I myself will vouch for him in every way."

Oh! this glowing confidence of youth—before there comes a surplus of lime in the bones, or the touch of winter in the heart! The Superintendent smiled. Knock in faith and the door shall be opened—there are those whom no one can turn away. A stray bed was found in the garret for the stranger, and the next morning he was earnestly at work cataloguing the dried plants in the herbarium, a task long delayed because there was no one to do it.

* * * * *

The study of Natural History in the University of Upsala was, at this time, at a low ebb. It was like the Art Department in many of the American colleges: its existence largely confined to the school catalog. There were many weeks of biting poverty and neglect for Linnaeus, but he worked away in obscurity and silence and endured, saying all the time, "The sun will come out, the sun will come out!" Doctor Olaf Rudbeck had charge of the chair of Botany, but seldom sat in it. His business was medicine. He gave no lectures, but the report was that he made his students toil at cultivating in his garden—this to open up their intellectual pores. In the course of his work, Linnaeus devised a sex plan of classification, instead of the so-called natural method. He wrote out his ideas and submitted them to Rudbeck.

The learned Doctor first pooh-poohed the plan, then tolerated it, and in a month claimed he had himself devised it. On the scheme being explained to others there was opposition, and Rudbeck requested Linnaeus to amplify his notes into a thesis, and read it as a lecture. This was done, and so pleased was the old man that he appointed Linnaeus his adjunctus. In the Spring of Seventeen Hundred Thirty, Linnaeus began to give weekly lectures on some topic of Natural History.

Linnaeus was now fairly launched. His animation, clear thinking, handsome face and graceful ways made his lectures very popular. Science in his hands was no longer the dull and turgid thing it had before been in the University. He would give a lecture in the hall, and then invite the audience to walk with him in the woods. He seemed to know everything: birds, beetles, bugs, beasts, trees, weeds, flowers, rocks and stones were to him familiar.

He showed his pupils things they had walked on all their lives and never seen.

The old Botanical Garden that had degenerated into a kitchen-garden for the Commons was rearranged and furnished with many specimens gathered round about.

A system of exchange was carried on with other schools, and Natural History at Upsala was fast becoming a feature. Old Doctor Rudbeck hobbled around with the classes, and when Linnaeus lectured sat in a front seat, applauding by rapping his cane on the floor and ejaculating words of encouragement.

Linnaeus was now receiving invitations to lecture at other schools in the vicinity. He made excursions and reports on the Natural History of the country around. The Academy of Science of Upsala now selected him to go to Lapland and explore the resources of that country, which was then little known.

The journey was to be a long and dangerous one. It meant four thousand miles of travel on foot, by sledge and on horseback, over a country that was for the most part mountainous, without roads, and peopled with semi-savages.

There were two reasons why Linnaeus should make the trip:

One was he had the hardihood and the fortitude to do it.

And second, he was not wanted at Upsala. He was becoming too popular. One rival professor had gone so far as to prefer formal charges of scientific heresy; he also made the telling point that Linnaeus was not a college graduate. The rule of the University was that no lecturer, teacher or professor should be employed who did not have a degree from some foreign University.

Inquiry was made and it was found that Linnaeus had left the University of Lund under a cloud. Linnaeus was confronted with the charge, and declined to answer it, thus practically pleading guilty. So, to get him out of Upsala seemed a desirable thing, both to friends and to foes. His friends secured the commission for the Lapland exploration, and his enemies made no objections, merely whispering, "Good riddance!" To be twenty-four, in good health, with hair like that of General Custer, a heart to appreciate Nature, a good horse under you, and a commission from the State to do an important work, in your left-hand breast-pocket—what Heaven more complete!

A reception was tendered the young naturalist in the great hall, and he addressed the students on the necessity of doing your work as well as you can, and being kind. Before beginning his arduous and dangerous journey, Linnaeus went to Lund to visit his old patron, Doctor Stobaeus. Time, the great healer, had cured the Doctor of his hate, and he now spoke of Linnaeus as his best pupil. He had left hastily by the wan light of the moon, without leaving orders where his mail was to be forwarded; but now he was received as an honored guest. All the little misunderstandings they had were laughed over as jokes.

From Lund, Linnaeus went to his home in Smaland to visit his parents.

It is needless to say that they were very proud of him, and the villagers turned out in great numbers to do him honor, perhaps, in their simplicity, not knowing why.

* * * * *

The account of the Lapland trip by Linnaeus is to be found in his book, "Lachesis Lapponica."

The journey covered over four thousand miles and took from May to November, Seventeen Hundred Thirty-one. The volume is in the form of a daily journal, and is as interesting as "Robinson Crusoe." There is no night there in Summer; but for all this, Lapland is not a paradise.

It is a great stretch of desert, vast steppes and lofty mountains, with here and there fertile valleys. To be out in the wide open, with no companions but a horse and a dog, filled Linnaeus' heart with a wild joy. As he went on, the road grew so rough that he had to part with the horse, which he did with a pang, but the dog kept him company.

To be educated is to liberate the mind from its trammels and fears—to set it free, new-chiseled from the rock. Linnaeus reveled in the vast loneliness of the steppes and took a hearty satisfaction in the hard fare. His gun and fishing-rod stood him in good stead; there were berries at times, and edible barks and watercress, and when these failed he had a little bag of meal and dried reindeer-tongues to fall back upon.

The simplicity of his living is shown best in the fact that the expenses for the entire journey, occupying seven months, were only twenty-five pounds, or less than one hundred twenty-five dollars. The Academy had set aside sixty pounds, and their surprise at having most of the money returned to them, instead of a demand being made for more, won them, hand and heart. He had hit the sturdy old burghers in a sensitive spot—the pocketbook—and they passed resolutions declaring him the world's greatest naturalist, and voted him a medal, to be cast at his own expense. Fame is delightful, but as collateral it does not rank high.

Linnaeus was without funds and without occupation. He gave a course of lectures at the University on his explorations, where every seat was taken, and even the stage and windows were filled. The sprightliness, grace and intellect Linnaeus brought to bear illumined his theme.

When Linnaeus lectured, all classes were dismissed: none could rival him. His very excellence was his disadvantage. Jealousy was hot on his trail, for he was disturbing the balance of stupidity. A movement grew to force him from the college. Formal charges were made, and when the case came to a trial the even tenor of justice was disturbed by Linnaeus making an attack on Professor Rosen, his principal enemy, with intent to kill him. Dueling has been forbidden in all the universities of Sweden since the year Sixteen Hundred Eighty-two, and the diversion replaced by quartet singing. So when Linnaeus challenged his enemy to fight, and warned him he would kill him if he didn't fight, and also if he did, things were in a bad way for Linnaeus.

The former charges were dropped to take up the more serious—just as when a man is believed to be guilty of murder, no mention is made of his crime of larceny.

Poor Linnaeus was under the ban. The enemy had won: Linnaeus must leave. But where should he go—what could he do? No college would receive him after his being compelled to leave Upsala for riot. He decided that if disgrace were to be his on account of revenge, he would accept the disgrace. He would kill Rosen on sight and then either commit suicide or accept the consequences: it was all one! And so, laying plans to waylay his victim, he fell asleep and dreamed he had done the deed.

He awoke in a sweat of horror!

He heard the officers at the door! He staggered to his feet, and was making wild plans to fight the pursuers, when it occurred to him that he had only dreamed. He sat down, faint, but mightily relieved.

Then he laughed, and it came to him that opposition was a part of the great game of life. To do a thing was to jostle others, and to jostle and be jostled was the fate of every man of power. "He that endureth unto the end shall be saved."

The world was before him—the flowers still bloomed, and plants nodded their heads in the meadows; the summer winds blew across the fields of wheat, the branches waved. He was strong—he could plant and plow, or dig ditches, or hew lumber!

Some one was hammering on the door; they had been knocking for fully five minutes—ah! There had been no murder, so surely it was not the officers.

He arose slowly and opened the door, murmuring apologies. A letter for Carolus Linnaeus! The letter was from Baron Reuterholm of Dalecarlia. It contained a draft for twenty-five pounds, "as a token of good faith," and begged that Linnaeus would accept charge of an expedition to survey the natural resources of Dalecarlia in the same way that he had Lapland, only with greater minuteness. Linnaeus read the letter again. The draft fluttered from his fingers to the floor.

"Pick that up!" he peremptorily ordered of the messenger. He wanted to see if the other man saw it too.

The other man did pick it up! Linnaeus was not dreaming, then, after all!

* * * * *

This second expedition had two objects: one was the better education of Baron Reuterholm's two sons, and the other the survey. One of these sons was at the University of Upsala, and he had conceived such an admiration for Linnaeus that he had written home about him. No man knows what he is doing: we succeed by the right oblique. Little did Linnaeus guess that he was preparing the way for great good fortune. The second excursion was one of luxury. It lacked all the hardships of the first, and involved the management of a party. Reuterholm was a rich Jewish banker, and a man in close touch with all Swedish affairs of State. This time Linnaeus was provided with ample funds.

Linnaeus had a genius for system—a head for business. He classified men, and systematized his work like a general in the field. There were seven young naturalists in the party, and to each Linnaeus assigned a special work, with orders to hand in a written report of progress each evening. That the "Economist" or steward of the party was an American lends an especial note of interest for us. After Dalecarlia it was to be America!

In money matters he was punctilious and accurate, the result of his early training in making both ends meet. The habits of thrift, industry, energy and absolute honesty had made him a marked man—there is not so much competition along these lines.

The maps, measurements, drawings, and the exact, short, sharp, military reports turned in at regular intervals to the Baron won that worthy absolutely.

Linnaeus was a businessman as well as a naturalist. It would require a book to tell of the glorious half-gypsy life of these eight young men, moving slowly through woods, across plains, over mountains and meadows, studying soil, rocks, birds, trees and flowers, collecting and making records.

Camping at night by flowing streams, awakening with the dawn and cooking breakfast by the campfire in a silence that took up their shouts of laughter in surprise, and echoed them back from the neighboring hills! At last the journey was ended. Linnaeus had proved his ability to teach—his animation, good-cheer and friendly qualities brought his pupils very close to him. Reuterholm insisted that he should attach himself to the rising little college at Fahlun. There he met Doctor Moraeus, a man of much worth in a scientific way. At his house Linnaeus made his home. There was a daughter in the household, Sara Elizabeth, tall, slender, appreciative and studious. One of the Reuterholms had courted her, but in vain.

There were the usual results, and when Carolus and Sara Elizabeth came to Doctor Moraeus hand in hand for his blessing, he granted it as good men always do. Then the Doctor gave Linnaeus some good advice—go to Holland or somewhere and get a doctor's degree. The enemies at Upsala called Linnaeus "the gypsy scientist." Silence them—Linnaeus was now a great man, and the world would yet acknowledge it. Sara Elizabeth agreed in all of the propositions.

Love, they say, is blind, but sometimes love is a regular telescope. This time love saw things that the learned men of Upsala failed to discover—their diagnosis was wrong. Linnaeus had prepared a thesis on intermittent fever, and he was assured that if he presented this thesis at the medical school at Harderwijk, Holland, with letters from Baron Reuterholm and Doctor Moraeus, it would secure him the much desired M.D.

A few months, at most, would suffice. He could then return to Fahlun and take his place as a practising physician and a professor in the college, marry the lady of his choice and live happy ever afterward.

So he started away southward. In due time, he arrived at Harderwijk and read his thesis to the faculty. Instead of the callow youth, such as they usually dealt with, they found a practised speaker who defended his points with grace and confidence. The degree was at once voted, and a "cum laude" thrown in for good measure. Linnaeus was asked to remain there and give a course of lectures on natural history. This he did. Before going home he thought he would take a little look in on Leyden, at that time the bookmaking and literary center of the world. At Leyden he met Gronovius, the naturalist, who asked him to remain and give lectures at the University. He did so, and incidentally showed Gronovius the manuscript of his book on the new system of botanic classification.

Gronovius was so delighted that he insisted on having the book printed by the Plantins at his own expense. Here was a piece of good fortune Linnaeus had not anticipated.

Linnaeus now settled down to read the proofs and help the work through the presses. But he never idled an hour.

He studied, wrote and lectured, and made little excursions with his friends through the fields. The book finished, he hastened to send copies back to Fahlun to Sara Elizabeth, saying he must see Amsterdam and then go to Antwerp to visit his new-found printer-friends there, and then go home!

At Amsterdam he remained a whole year, living at the house of Burman, the naturalist.

The wealthy banker, Cliffort, first among amateur botanists of his day, invited Linnaeus to visit him at his country-house at Hartecamp. Here he saw the finest garden he had ever looked upon. Cliffort had copies of Linnaeus' book and he now insisted that the author should remain, catalog his collection and issue the book with the help of the Plantins, all without regard to cost. It took a year to get the work out, but it yet remains one of the finest things ever attempted in a bookmaking way on the subject of botany.

About the same time, with the help of Cliffort, Linnaeus published another big book of his own called, "Fundamenta Botanica." This book was taken up at Oxford and used as a textbook, in preference to Ray.

Linnaeus received invitations from England and was persuaded to take a trip across to that country. He visited Oxford and London, and was received by scientific men as a conquering hero. He saw Garrick act and heard George Frederick Handel, where the crowd was so great that a notice was posted requesting gentlemen to come without swords and ladies without hoops. Handel composed an aria in his honor.

Returning to Leyden, Linnaeus was urged by the municipality to remain and rearrange the public flower-gardens and catalog the rare plants at the University. This took a year, in which three more books were issued under his skilful care.

He now started for home in earnest, by way of Paris, with what a contemporary calls "a trunkful of medals."

Paris, too, had honors and employment for the great botanist, but he escaped and at last reached Fahlun. He had been gone nearly four years, and during the interval had established his place in the scientific world as the first botanist of the time.

"It was love that sent me out of Sweden, and but for love I would never have returned," he wrote.

Linnaeus and Sara Elizabeth were married June Twenty-six, Seventeen Hundred Thirty-nine.

Now the unexpected happened: Upsala petitioned Linnaeus to return, and the man who headed the petition was the one who had driven him away and who came near being killed for his pains. Linnaeus and his wife went to Upsala, rich, honored, beloved.

Linnaeus shifted the scientific center of gravity of all Europe to a town, practically to them obscure, a thing they themselves scarcely realized.

Henceforth, the life of Linnaeus flowed forward like a great and mighty river—everything made way for him. He was invited by the King of Spain to come to that country and found a School of Science, and so lavish were the promises that they surely would have turned the head of a lesser man. Universities in many civilized countries honored themselves by giving him degrees.

In Seventeen Hundred Sixty-one, the King of Sweden issued a patent of nobility in his honor, and thereafter he was Carl von Linne. In England he was known as Sir Charles Linn.

Sainte-Beuve, the eminent French critic, says that the world has produced only about half a dozen men who deserve to be placed in the first class. The elements that make up this super-superior man are high intellect, which abandons itself to the purpose in hand, careless of form and precedent; indifference to obstacles and opposition; and a joyous, sympathetic, loving spirit that runs over and inundates everything it touches, all with no special thought of personal pleasure, gratification or gain.

Linnaeus seems in every way to fill the formula.



THOMAS H. HUXLEY

That man, I think, has a liberal education whose body has been so trained in youth that it is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth running order, ready, like a steam-engine, to be turned to any kind of work and to spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with the knowledge of the great fundamental truths of Nature and the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions have been trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; one who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to esteem others as himself.

—Thomas Henry Huxley

THOMAS H. HUXLEY

That was a great group of thinkers to which Huxley belonged.

The Mutual Admiration Society forms the sunshine in which souls grow—great men come in groups. Sir Francis Galton says there were fourteen men in Greece in the time of Pericles who made Athens possible. A man alone is only a part of a man.

Praxiteles by himself could have done nothing. Ictinus might have drawn the plans for the Parthenon, but without Pericles the noble building would have remained forever the stuff which dreams are made of. And they do say that without Aspasia Pericles would have been a mere dreamer of dreams, and Walter Savage Landor overheard enough of their conversation to prove it.

William Morris and seven men working with him formed the Preraphaelite Brotherhood and gave the workers and doers of the world an impetus they yet feel.

Cambridge and Concord had seven men who induced the Muses to come to America and take out papers.

These men of the Barbizon School tinted the entire art world: Millet, Rousseau, Daubigny, Corot, Diaz. And the people who worked a complete revolution in the theological thought of Christendom were these: Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Tyndall, Wallace, Huxley and, yes, George Eliot, who bolstered the brain of Herbert Spencer when he was learning to think for himself.

When the victory had become a rout, there were many others who joined forces with the evolutionists; but at first the thinkers named above stood together and received the rather unsavory gibes and jeers of those who get their episcopopagy and science from the same source.

Darwin was the only man in the group who was a university graduate, and he once said that he owed nothing to his Alma Mater, save the stimulus derived from her disapproval.

For the work these men had to do there was no precedent: no one had gone before and blazed a trail.

Learning, like capital, is timid; but ignorance coupled with a desire to know, is bold. Do I then make a plea for ignorance? Yes, most assuredly. It is just as well not to know so much, as to be a theologian and know so many things that are not true.

Learning and institutions of learning subdue men into conformity; only the man who belongs to nothing is free; and ignorance, as well as a certain indifference to what the world has said and done, is a necessary factor in the character of him who would do a great work. It was the combined ignorance and boldness of Columbus that made it possible for him to give the world a continent.

Yet the man who has not had a college training often feels he has somehow missed something valuable: there is timidity and hesitation when he is in the presence of those who have had "advantages." And Huxley felt this loss, more or less, up to his thirty-fifth year, when Fate had him cross swords with college men, and then the truth became his that if he had had the regular university training, it was quite probable that he would have accepted the doctrines the universities taught, and would then have been in the camp of the "enemy," instead of with what he called the "blessed minority."

Isolation is a great aid to the thinker. Some of the best books the world has ever known were written behind prison-bars; exile has done much for literature, and a protracted sea-voyage has allowed many a good man to roam the universe in imagination. Some of Macaulay's best essays were written on board slow-going sailing-ships that were blown by vagrant winds from England to India. Darwin, Hooker and Huxley, all got their scientific baptism on board of surveying-ships, where time was plentiful and anything but fleeting, and most everything else was scarce.

Huxley was only assistant surgeon on the "Rattlesnake," and above him was a naturalist who much of his time lay in his bunk and read treatises on this and also on that.

Huxley was the seventh child of a plodding schoolteacher, born on the seventh day of the week on a seventh-floor back, he used to say. His genius for work came from his mother, a tireless, ambitious woman, who got things done while others were discussing them. "Had she been a man, she would have been leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons," her son used to say.

College education was not for that goodly brood—a living was the first thing, so after a good drilling in the three R's, Thomas Huxley was apprenticed to a pharmacist who paid him six shillings a week, a sum that the boy conscientiously gave to his mother.

Oh, if in our schoolteaching we could only teach this one thing: a great thirst for knowledge! But this desire we can not impart: it is trial, difficulty, obstacle, deprivation and persecution that make souls hunger and thirst after knowledge. Young Huxley wanted to know. His thoroughness in the drugstore won the admiration of the doctors whose prescriptions he compounded, and several of them loaned him books and took him to clinics; and at seventeen we find him with a Free Scholarship in Charing Cross Hospital, serving as nurse and assistant surgeon. Then came the appointment as assistant surgeon in the Navy, and the appointment to "H.M.S. Rattlesnake," bound on a four-year trip to the Antipodes, all quite as a matter of course.

Life is a sequence: this happened today because you did that yesterday. Tomorrow will be the result of today.

The general idea of evolution was strong in the mind of young Huxley. He realized that Nature was moving, growing, changing all things. He had studied embryology, and had seen how the body of a man begins as a single minute mass of protoplasm, without organs or dimensions.

Behind the ship was his dragnet, and he worked almost constantly recording the different specimens of animal and vegetable life that he thus secured. The jellyfish attracted him most.

To the ship's naturalist, jellyfish were jellyfish, but Huxley saw that there were many kinds, distinct, separate, peculiar. He began to dissect them and thus began his book on jellyfish, just as Darwin wrote his work on barnacles.

Huxley vowed to himself that before the "Rattlesnake" got back to England he would know more about jellyfish than any other living man. That his ambition was realized no one now disputes.

Among his first discoveries, it came to him with a thrill that a certain species of jellyfish bears a very close resemblance to the human embryo at a certain stage.

And he remembered the dictum of Goethe, that the growth of the individual mirrors the growth of the race. And he paraphrased it thus: "The growth of the individual mirrors the growth of the species." So filled was he with the thought that he could not sleep, so he got up and paced the deck and tried to explain his great thought to the second mate. He was getting ready for "The Origin of Species," which he once said to Darwin he would himself have written, if Darwin had been a little more of a gentleman and had held off for a few years.

It was on board the "Rattlesnake" that Huxley wrote this great truth: "Nature has no designs or intentions. All that live exist only because they have adapted themselves to the hard lines that Nature has laid down. We progress as we comply."

* * * * *

In Australia, while waiting for his ship to locate and map a dangerous reef, Huxley went ashore, and as he playfully expressed it, "ran upon another."

The name of the most excellent young woman who was to become his wife was Henrietta Heathorn; and Julian Hawthorne has discovered that she belongs to the same good stock from whence came our Nathaniel of Salem.

It did not take the young naturalist and this stranded waif, seven thousand miles from home, long to see that they had much in common. Both were eager for truth, both had the ability to cut the introduction and reach live issues directly. "I saw you were a woman with whom only honesty would answer," he wrote her thirty years after. He was still in love with her.

Yet she was a proud soul, and no assistant surgeon on an insignificant sloop would answer her—when he got his surgeon's commission she would marry him. And it was seven years before she journeyed to England alone with that delightful object in view. He had to serve for her as Jacob did for Rachel, with this difference: Jacob loved several, but Thomas Huxley loved but one.

Huxley's wife was his companion, confidante, comrade, friend. I can not recall another so blest, in all the annals of thinking men, save John Stuart Mill. "I tell her everything I know, or guess, or imagine, so as to get it straight in my own mind," he said to John Fiske.

In that most interesting work, "Life and Lessons of Huxley," compiled by his son Leonard, are constant references and allusions to this most ideal mating. In reply to the question, Is marriage a failure? I would say, "No, provided the man marries a woman like Huxley's wife, and the woman marries a man like Huxley."

* * * * *

There is a classic aphorism which runs about this way, "Knock and the world knocks with you; boost and you boost alone." Like most popular sayings this is truth turned wrong side out.

John Fiske once called Thomas Huxley an "appreciative iconoclast." That is to say, Huxley was a persistent protester (which is different from a protestant), and at the same time, he was a friend who never faltered and grew faint in time of trouble. Huxley always sniffed the battle from afar and said, Ha! Ha!

There be those who do declare that the success of Huxley was owing to his taking the tide at the flood, and riding into high favor on the Darwinian wave. To say that there would have been no Huxley had there been no Darwin would be one of those unkind cuts the cruelty of which lies in its truth.

It is equally true that if there had been no Lincoln there would have been no Grant; but Grant was a very great man just the same—so why raise the issue!

Darwin summed up and made nebulae of the truths which Huxley had, up to that time, held only in gaseous form.

Darwin was born in the immortal year Eighteen Hundred Nine. Huxley was born in Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five. When "The Origin of Species" was published in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, Thomas Huxley was thirty-four years old. He had made his four years' trip around the world on the surveying-ship "Rattlesnake," just as Darwin had made his eventful voyage on the "Beagle."

These men in many ways had paralleled each other; but Darwin had sixteen years the start, and during these years he had steadily and silently worked to prove the great truth that he had sensed intuitively years before in the South Seas.

"The Origin of Species" sheds light in ten thousand ways on the fact that all life has evolved from very lowly forms and is still ascending: that species were not created by fiat, but that every species was the sure and necessary result of certain conditions.

Until "The Origin of Species" was published, and for some years afterward, the Immutability of Species was taught in all colleges, and everywhere accepted by the so-called learned men.

Goethe had somewhat dimly prophesied the discovery of the Law of Evolution, but his ideas on natural science were regarded by the schools as quite on a par with those of Dante: neither was taken seriously.

Darwin proved his hypothesis. Doubtless, very many schoolmen would have accepted the theory, but to admit that man was not created outright, complete, and in his present form, or superior to it, seemed to evolve a contradiction of the Mosaic account of Creation, and the breaking up of Christianity. And these things done, many thought, would entail moral chaos, destruction of private interests and moral confusion being one and the same thing to those whose interests are involved. And so for conscience' sake, Darwin was bitterly assailed and opposed.

Opportunity, which knocks many times at each man's door, rapped hard at Huxley's door in Eighteen Hundred Sixty. It was at Oxford, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: "A big society with a slightly ironical name," once said Huxley. The audience was large and fashionable, delegates being present from all parts of the British Empire.

"The Origin of Species" had been published the year before, and tongues were wagging. Darwin was not present; but Huxley, who was known to be a personal friend of Darwin, was in his seat. The intent of the chairman was to keep Darwin and his pestiferous book out of all the discussions: Darwin was a good man to smother with silence.

But Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in the course of a speech on another subject began to run short of material, and so switched off upon a theme which he had already exploited from the pulpit with marked effect. All public speakers carry this boiler-plate matter for use in time of stress.

The Bishop began to denounce "those enemies of the Church and Society who make covert attacks upon the Bible in the name of Science." He warmed to his theme, and by a specious series of misstatements and various appeals to the prejudices of his audience worked the assemblage up to a high pitch of hilarity and enthusiasm. Toward the close of his speech he happened to spy Huxley seated near, and pointing a pudgy finger at him, "begged to be informed if the learned gentleman was really willing to be regarded as a descendant of a monkey?"