an, together with his deep absorption in his
work, arrested his attention; he sat down and talked with him. In
five minutes Carl had found a friend and the Dean a helper. He had
been commissioned to write a book on the plants of the Holy Land and
had collected a botanical library for the purpose, but the work
lagged. Here now was the one who could help set it going. That day
Linnaeus left his attic room and went to live in the Dean's house.
His days of starvation were over.

In the Dean's employ his organizing genius developed the marvellous
skill of the cataloguer that brought order out of the chaos of
groping and guessing and blundering in which the science of botany
had floundered up till then. Here and there in it all were flashes
of the truth, which Linnaeus laid hold of and pinned down with his
own knowledge to system and order. Thus the Frenchman, Sebastian
Vaillant, who had died a dozen years before, had suggested a
classification of flowers by their seed-bearing organs, the stamens
and pistils, instead of by their fruits, the number of their petals,
or even by their color, as had been the vague practice of the past.
Linnaeus seized upon this as the truer way and wrote a brief treatise
developing the idea, which so pleased Dr. Celsius that he got his
young friend a license to lecture publicly in the Botanical Garden.

The students flocked to hear him. His message was one that put life
and soul into the dry bones of a science that had only wearied them
before. The professor of botany himself sat in the front row and
hammered the floor with his cane in approval. But his very success
was the lecturer's undoing. Envy grew in place of the poverty he had
conquered. The instructor, Nils Rosen, was abroad taking his
doctor's degree. He came home to find his lectures deserted for the
irresponsible teachings of a mere undergraduate. He made grievous
complaint, and Linnaeus was silenced, to his great good luck. For so
his friend the professor, though he was unable to break the red tape
of the university, got him an appointment to go to Lapland on a
botanical mission. His enemies were only too glad to see him go.

Linnaeus travelled more than three thousand miles that summer through
a largely unknown country, enduring, he tells us, more hardships and
dangers than in all his subsequent travels. Again and again he
nearly lost his life in swollen mountain streams, for he would not
wait until danger from the spring freshets