Darling one were to say "Mr. Darling's
beautiful, slender, graceful, blue-eyed girl with long, golden curls
and rosy cheeks."

The binomial system revolutionized the science. What the lines of
longitude and latitude did for geography Linnaeus' genius did for
botany. And he did not let pride of achievement persuade him that he
had said the last word. He knew his system to be the best till some
one should find a better, and said so. The King gave him a noble
name and he was proud of it with reason--vain, some have said. But
vanity did not make the creature deny the Creator. He ever tried to
trace science to its author. When the people were frightened by the
"water turning to blood" and overzealous priests cried that it was a
sign of the wrath of God, he showed under the magnifying glass the
presence of innumerable little animals that gave the water its
reddish tinge, and thereby gave offence to some pious souls. But
over the door of his lecture room were the words in Latin: "Live
guiltless--God sees you!" and in his old age, seeing with prophetic
eye the day of bacteriology that dawned a hundred years after his
death, he thanked God that He had permitted him to "look into His
secret council room and workshop."

He was one of the clear thinkers of all days, uniting imagination
with sound sense. It was Linnaeus who discovered that plants sleep
like animals. The Pope ordered that his books, wherever they were
found in his dominions, should be burned as materialistic and
heretical; but Linnaeus lived to see a professor in botany at Rome
dismissed because he did not understand his system, and another put
in his place who did, and whose lectures followed his theories. When
he was seventy he was stricken with apoplexy, while lecturing to his
students, and the last year of his life was full of misery.
"Linnaeus limps," is one of the last entries in his diary, "can
hardly walk, speaks unintelligibly, and is scarce able to write."
Death came on January 10, 1778.

Under the white flashes of the northern lights in the desolate land
he explored in his youth, there grows in the shelter of the spruce
forests a flower which he found and loved beyond any other, the
_Linnaea borealis_, named after him. In some pictures we have of him,
he is seen holding a sprig of it in his hand. It is the twin flower
of the northern Pacific coast and of Labrador, indeed of the far
northern woods from Labrador all the way to Alaska, that lifts its
del