THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINNAUS.*
MRS. CADDY has produced a book which would, we believe, have delighted the heart of Charles Lamb. This will sound like high praise, and as such we mean it, though it may not strike every one as praise unadalterate. In substance, the work is bio- graphical, but its author has cunningly eluded the strictures to which the severely judicial critic must inevitably have given utterance had she called it a biography. Even her sub.title, "A Chapter in Swedish History," is a rather dangerous chal- lenge to critically minded persons, for the history as well as the biography of the book is held in solution rather than crystallised into form and coherence ; but this very defect of formlessness, as some will think it, will constitute its crowning virtue for Lamb-like souls. It is so delightfully unbusinesslike, so rich in pleasant suggestions of lazy leisure, so utterly free from any- thing to suggest the thought of hurry or of task-work, or of something waiting to be done when the walk through the fields with Liunmns comes to an end. Upon some of us the feeling of the shortness of life, the thought of "the petty done, the undone vast," weighs at times a little heavily ; and there is a positive sense of refreshment and emancipation in coming across a book which seems to accept ample leisure as an obvious fact of existence, cheerfully to be taken for granted, not a line of which has been written in haste or been meant to be read in haste,—a book which suggests the river wandering at its own sweet will, and bearing its readers along on its placid, unhurry- iug tide. The peculiar quality of the work is its charming or irritating discursiveness,—readers must make their own choice of epithet. Mrs. Caddy is genuinely interested in Linnaeus, and much research and travel have enabled her to tell every- thing about him that the reader is likely to want to know ; but then, she is equally interested in a number of other themes—in architecture, for example—and she never hesitates to leave the botanist for two or three pages to describe some building • Through the Fields with .Lbutreue. By afro. Florease Caddy. In 2 rob. Landon t Longmate. Groan. and Co. which the great man saw or entered, or might have seen or entered, and which, at any rate, has been seen and admired by the writer, and been somehow associated in her mind with the life of Linnanur. Then, too, Mrs. Caddy ie clearly a fitiriy omnivorous reader with a capital verbal memory, and the tempta- tion to make a pet quotation—which is generally a good one that we are glad to have—is too strong to be resisted, nor does she make any attempt to resist it, even when the relevance of the quoted matter is, to say the least, not apparent at the first glance. When we add that Mrs. Caddy has thoughts upon many things entirely unconnected with botany, and that she expresses them as they arise, it may be thought that poor Linnaeus must be altogether lost. This, however, is really not the case. It is astonishing how much can be said in some seven hundred pages; and when we reach the end of Mrs. Caddy's second volume, and look back upon the course of our journey " through the fields," we do not lose much of the outline of the path, and we do feel that we have learned to know the gentle, brave Nature. lover who has been our companion by the way.
We have in a preceding sentence given the reader his choice of two epithets ; but we think we have made the nature of our own choice tolerably apparent, and if our lead is followed, the " irritating " will be struck out and the " charming " left. People who call Mrs. Caddy's method mere book-making, mistake the form for the spirit. The book-maker is a mechanic, often a useful one, but still a mechanic ; Mrs. Caddy is an enthusiast with the enthusiast's infectious gusto, and enthusiasm is gradually acquiring, in addition to its intrinsic value, the ex- trinsic preciousness of rarity. In the present work, she has all the advantages given by an admirable subject ; for the life of Linnesus, though in one sense a quiet and unexciting one, is rich in material which appeals to the imagination. The early part of it was curiously full of happy surprises, and the believers in "luck," who still linger among us as survivals of a pre- scientific age, will find much to reinforce their sorely harassed superstition. Few persons ever lived from whose lips the words "all things are against me" would have sounded less un- gracious and ungrateful than from those of the young botanist. Against him, as against Sisera, the stars in their courses seemed to fight ; and yet always, just at the moment when things were at the worst, some good angel appeared to take the despairing youth by the hand. The story of one of these crises has so much dramatic effectiveness, that it might well serve as the subject of a poem ; indeed, it reminds us strongly of an episode in a fine poem much admired by Rossetti and other judges, but little known by readers at large, —The Prince's Quest, by Mr. William Watson. The young Linnaeus, after having been, to the bitter disappointment of his father and mother, condemned as incapable by his schoolmasters, was just on the point of being sentenced to the uninspiring life of a cobbler, when he was rescued by a certain Dr. Rothman, who took him in hand for three years, gave him instruction in botany and physiology, and suggested hopes that the youth—in spite of the schoolmasters—might have that in him which would qualify him for the profession of medicine. For this, however, it was necessary that Rothman's instructions should be followed by a course of systematic study at a University ; and as means were not forthcoming in the Linnus household, the cobbler's bench seemed to be coming again within the field of vision when, all at once, Professor Humerus, of Lund University, a relative of the lad's mother, stepped into the breach, and urged that he should straightway be sent to that seat of learning, where he (the Professor) would provide his maintenance so long as he should require it. There could be no hesitation in accepting such an offer as this, and, after the necessary preliminaries, the young Liusaus—unburdened with the impedimenta of an Oxford or Cambridge freshman—set out to traverse on foot the eighty. four miles which lay between him and his goal. The chapter which tells the story of this primitive, journey is a charming little idyll, but it is with what was waiting for Linnaeus at Lund that we are now conceraoi. Arriving at the little city, the youth wandered through the market-place and into the fine Norman cathedral. A funeral was going on, and various in- dications showed that the dead man was a person of considera- tion; but though the pageant somewhat awed the young visitor, it impressed and interested him leas than the noble building, the like of which he had probably never before seen. Only when The long line of white-capped, mourning students following the black.draped banners met his gaze, did be casually ask a bystander whose funeral it was that was thus honoured, and
received the staggering reply,—" It is that of a Professor in the University, Professor Humerus."
It is- seldom that real life arranges a situation quite so artistically. Gathering clouds generally herald the flash that is to shatter our hopes ; but here, indeed, was a bolt from the blue. The youth now looked, not with languid curiosity, but with passionate despair, at the coffin in which it seemed all the possibilities of his life were soon to be buried; and yet even in this moment of direst extremity help was just at hand. When sitting dejectedly on a tomb-stone, he was recognised by one of the principal men in the procession, no other than Gabriel Hiik, his sister's suitor ; and he, learning the poor lad's story, at once decided that, so far as in him lay, he would do for Linnaeus what the dead Professor would have done. He procured him admission to the University, and, being himself a poor man, secured for him the interest of a wealthier patron, Kilian Stobseus, the Professor of Botany and Medicine, who not only offered him a home with his own family free of all expense, but superintended his studies, and gave him the run of his fine collection of natural history.
Thus was Lim:Irene fairly started on his way ; but for many a year to come, the way was to be anything but a smooth one, though never did it seem so hopelessly blocked as in the moment when he received that crushing answer to his carelessly asked question. Mrs. Caddy tells the story of these straggles and difficulties and happy visitations of kind fortune very sympathetically and pleasantly, and even her rambling manner is hardly inappropriate in telling the story of a life so large a portion of which may be described as a long ramble. Linnaeus was a true knight-errant of science, and the most enjoyable portions of Mrs. Caddy's book are those which beet justify its title and take us out into the open air and through the fields. The scientific wrangles and jealousies sometimes bore us—like Tennyson, we " hate the spites and the follies "—brit these journeyings are altogether healthful and delightful. A specially interesting chapter is the one which closes the first volume,— the chapter devoted to his visit to England, which contains, of course, the often told bat always beautiful story of how when on breezy Putney Heath Linnaeus saw for the first time the bloom of the golden gorse, the simple-hearted Swede fell on his knees and thanked God for its beauty. The visitor seems to have had, on the whole, a pleasant time in this country, though it is clear that some of the English men of science received him but coldly. To Sir Hans Sloane he brought a Latin letter of introduction from Boerhaave, containing the following sentences, which are all the more noteworthy because written at a time when Linnaeus was still an unaccredited hero:—" Linnaeus, who will deliver to you this letter, is alone worthy of seeing you and of being seen by yon. They who witness your meeting will behold two men whom the world can scarcely equal." The letter was possibly a little deficient in tact. The famous Englishman may not have cared to have the little-known Swede " evened " with him ; and it is quite probable that Stroever was right in thinking that Linnieus's innovations excited in Sir Hans jealousy rather than admiration : it is, at any rate, certain that the two men who, according to Boerhaave, were alone worthy of seeing each other, never became friends. Elsewhere Linnaeus was more suc- cessful. Dillenius, the Botanical Professor at Oxford, was at first actively hostile ; and on being pressed to make more definite a vague charge against Limner's of having " confounded botany," he entered into an encounter in which his accusation and his enmity both perished : — " The Professor produced from the library a part of Linnzens's own Genera nantarum, printed at Leyden, a copy of which Grovonius had sent to Oxford. Lineman found N.B.' written on almost every page, and was informed that these letters marked the false genera. Lima:ens denied this, and they adjourned to the garden. The Pro- fessor referred to a plant which be and other botanists considered to have three stamens. On examination, it proved to have only one, as Linnmas had said. ' Oh ! it may be so accidentally in a single flower,' said the Professor ; but on examining a number of them, it was found to be the rale as Mancini; had stated it. Dillenins, though slow to be convinced, was not above learning truths he did not yet know. He detained Linneeas several days, and promised him what he had before denied,—that be should have the plants Clifford was so anxious to procure."
Few were the people whom Linnaeus did not conquer, as he
conquered the Oxford Professor—who must have been a good fellow at bottom—not by intellectual force alone, but by a winning modesty and graciousness that must have been very charming. Cromwell insisted on having his warts painted ; Linnieus seems to have had hardly any warts to paint. The history of science presents no more attractive figure, and Mrs. Caddy, amidst all her digressions, has not failed to do it justice.
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