university there on the strength of a thesis on the cause of
malarial fever, with the conclusions of which the learned doctors
did not agree; but they granted the diploma for the clever way
in which he defended it. On the way down he tarried in Hamburg
long enough to give the good burghers a severe jolt. They had a
seven-headed serpent that was one of the wonders of the town. The
keen sight of the young naturalist detected the fraud at once;
the heads were weasels’ heads, covered with serpent’s skin and
cunningly sewed on the head of the reptile. The shape of the jaws
betrayed the trick. But the Hamburgers were not grateful. The
serpent was an asset. There was a mortgage on it of ten thousand
marks; now it was not worth a hundred. They took it very ill, and
Linnæus found himself suddenly so unpopular that he was glad to get
out of town overnight. What became of the serpent history does not
record.
Linnæus had carried more than his thesis on malarial fever with him
to Holland. At the bottom of his trunk were the manuscripts of two
books on botany which, he told his sweetheart on parting, would yet
make him famous. Probably she shook her head at that. Pills and
powders, and broken legs to set, were more to her way of thinking,
and her father’s, too. If only he had patients, fame might take
care of itself. But now he put them both to shame. At Leyden he
found friends who brought out his first book, “Systema Naturæ,” in
which he divides all nature into the three kingdoms known to every
child since. It was hardly more than a small pamphlet, but it laid
the foundation for his later fame. To the enlarged tenth edition
zoölogists point back to this day as to the bed-rock on which they
built their science. The first was quickly followed by another, and
yet another. Seven large volumes bearing his name had come from the
press before he set sail for home, a whole library in botany, and a
new botany at that, so simple and sensible that the world adopted
it at once.
Dr. Hermann Boerhaave was at that time the most famous physician in
Europe. He was also the greatest authority on systematic botany.
Great men flocked to his door, but the testy old Dutchman let them
wait until it suited him to receive them. Peter the Great had to
cool his heels in his waiting-room two long hours before his turn
came. Linnæus he would not see at all—until he sent him a copy of
his book. Then he shut the door against all others and summoned
the author. The two walked through his garden, and the old doctor
pointed proudly to a tree which was very rare, he said, and not
in any of the books. Yes, said Linnæus, it was in Vaillant’s. The
doctor knew better; he had annotated Vaillant’s botany himself, and
it was not there. Linnæus insisted, and the doctor, in a temper,
went for the book to show him. But there it was; Linnæus was
right. Nothing would do then but he must stay in Holland. Linnæus
demurred; he could not afford it. But Dr. Boerhaave knew a way out
of that. He had for a patient Burgomaster Cliffort, a rich old
hypochondriac with whom he could do nothing because he would insist
on living high and taking too little exercise. When he came again
he told him that what he needed was a physician in daily attendance
upon him, and handed him over to Linnæus.
“He will fix your diet and fix your garden, too,” was his
prescription. The Burgomaster was a famous collector and had a
wondrous garden that was the apple of his eye. He took Linnæus
into his house and gave him a ducat a day for writing his menu and
cataloguing his collection. That was where his books grew, and the
biggest and finest of them was “Hortus Cliffortianus,” the account
of his patron’s garden.
Armed with letters from Dr. Boerhaave and the Burgomaster, he took
one stronghold of professional prejudice after another. Not without
a siege. One of them refused flatly to surrender. That was Sir Hans
Sloan, the great English naturalist, to whom Dr. Boerhaave wrote
in a letter that is preserved in the British Museum: “Linnæus, who
bears this letter, is alone worthy of seeing you, alone worthy of
being seen by you. He who shall see you both together shall see two
men whose like will scarce ever be found in the world.” And the
doctor was no flatterer, as may be inferred from his treatment of
Peter the Great. But the aged baronet had had his own way so long,
and was so well pleased with it, that he would have nothing to do
with Linnæus. At Oxford the learned professor Dillenius received
him with no better grace. “This,” he said aside to a friend, “is
the young man who confounds all botany,” and he took him rather
reluctantly into his garden. A plant that was new to him attracted
Linnæus’ attention and he asked to what family it belonged.
“That is more than you can tell me,” was the curt answer.
“I can, if you will let me pluck a flower and examine it.”
“Do, and be welcome,” said the professor, and his visitor after
a brief glance at the flower told its species correctly. The
professor stared.
“Now,” said Linnæus, who had kept his eyes open, “what did you mean
by the crosses you had put all through my book?” He had seen it
lying on the professor’s table, all marked up.
“They mark the errors you made,” declared the other.
“Suppose we see about that,” said the younger man and, taking
the book, led the way. They examined the flowers together, and
when they returned to the study all the pride had gone out of the
professor. He kept Linnæus with him a month, never letting him out
of his sight and, when he left, implored him with tears to stay and
share his professorship; the pay was enough for both.
A letter that reached him from home on his return to Holland made
him realize with a start that he had overstayed his leave. It was
now in the fourth year since he had left Sweden. All the while he
had written to his sweetheart in the care of a friend who proved
false. He wanted her for himself and, when the three years had
passed, told her that Carl would never come back. Dr. Moræus was
of the same mind, and had not a real friend of the absent lover
turned up in the nick of time Linnæus would probably have stayed a
Dutchman to his death. Now, on the urgent message of his friend, he
hastened home, found his Elisabeth holding out yet, married her and
settled down in Stockholm to practise medicine.
Famous as he had become, he found the first stretch of the row at
home a hard one to hoe. His books brought him no income. Nobody
would employ him, “even for a sick servant,” he complained. Envious
rivals assailed him and his botany, and there were days when
herring and black bread was fare not to be despised in Dr. Linnæus’
household. But he kept pegging away and his luck changed. One
well-to-do patient brought another, and at last the queen herself
was opportunely seized with a bad cough. She saw one of her ladies
take a pill and asked what it was. Dr. Linnæus’ prescription for
a cold, she said, and it always cured her right up. So the doctor
was called to the castle and his cure worked there, too. Not long
after that he set down in his diary that “Now, no one can get well
without my help.”
But he was not happy. “Once, I had flowers and no money,” he
said; “now, I have money and no flowers.” That they appointed him
professor of medicine at Upsala did not mend matters. His lectures
were popular and full of common sense. Diet and the simple life
were his hobbies, temperance in all things. He ever insisted that
where one man dies from drinking too much, ten die from overeating.
Children should eat four times a day, grown-ups twice, was his
rule. The foolish fashions and all luxury he abhorred. He himself
in his most famous years lived so plainly that some said he was
miserly, and his clothes were sometimes almost shabby. The happiest
day of his life came when he and his old enemy Rosén, whom he found
filling the chair of botany at the university, and with whom he
made it up soon after they became fellow members of the faculty,
exchanged chairs with the ready consent of the authorities. So, at
last, Linnæus had attained the place he coveted above all others,
and the goal of his ambition was reached.
He lived at Upsala thirty-seven years and wrote many books. His
students idolized him. They came from all over the world. Twice a
week in summer, on Wednesday and Saturday, they sallied forth with
him to botanize in field and forest, and when they had collected
specimens all the long day they escorted the professor home through
the twilight streets with drums and trumpets and with flowers
in their hats. But however late they left him at his door, the
earliest dawn saw him up and at his work, for the older he grew the
more precious the hours that remained. In summer he was accustomed
to rise at three o’clock; in the dark winter days at six.
He found biology a chaos and left it a science. In his special
field of botany he was not, as some think, the first. He himself
catalogued fully a thousand books on his topic. But he brought
order into it; he took what was good and, rejecting the false,
fashioned it into a workable system. In the mere matter of
nomenclature, his way of calling plants, like men, by a family name
and a given name wrought a change hard to appreciate in our day.
The common blue grass of our lawns, for instance, he called, and we
call it still, _Poa pratensis_. Up to his time it had three names
and one of them was _Gramen pratense paniculatum majus latiore
folio poa theophrasti_. Dr. Rydberg, of the New York Botanical
Gardens, said aptly at the bicentenary of his birth, that it was
as if instead of calling a girl Grace 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 Linnæus’ 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 Linnæus 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 Linnæus 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.
“Linnæus 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
_Linnæa 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 delicate, sweet-scented pink bells from the moss with gentle
appeal, “long overlooked, lowly, flowering early” despite cold and
storm, typical of the man himself.
NIELS FINSEN, THE WOLF-SLAYER
Hard by the town of Thorshavn, in the Faröe islands, a little lad
sat one day carving his name on a rock. His rough-coated pony
cropped the tufts of stunted grass within call. The grim North
Sea beat upon the shore below. What thoughts of the great world
without it stirred in the boy he never told. He came of a people
to whom it called all through the ages with a summons that rarely
went unheeded. If he heard he gave no sign. Slowly and laboriously
he traced in the stone the letters N.R.F. When he had finished he
surveyed his work with a quiet smile. “There!” he said, “that is
done.”
The years went by, and a distant city paused in its busy life to
hearken to bells tolling for one who lay dead. Kings and princes
walked behind his coffin and a whole people mourned. Yet in life he
had worn no purple. He was a plain, even a poor man. Upon his grave
they set a rock brought from the island in the North Sea, just like
the other that stands there yet, and in it they hewed the letters
N.R.F., for the man and the boy were one. And he who spoke there
said for all mankind that what he wrought was well done, for it was
done bravely and in love.
Niels Ryberg Finsen was born in 1860 in the Faröe islands, where
his father was an official under the Danish Government. His family
came of the sturdy old Iceland stock that comes down to our time
unshorn of its strength from the day of the vikings, and back to
Iceland his people sent him to get his education in the Reykjavik
Latin school, after a brief stay in Denmark where his teachers
failed to find the key to the silent, reserved lad. There he lived
the seven pregnant years of boyhood and youth, from fourteen to
twenty-one, and ever after there was that about him that brought to
mind the wild fastnesses of that storm swept land. Its mountains
were not more rugged than his belief in the right as he saw it.
The Reykjavik school had a good name, but school and pupils were
after their own kind. Conventional was hardly the word for it. Some
of the “boys” were twenty and over. Finsen loved to tell of how
they pursued the studies each liked best, paying scant attention to
the rest. In their chosen fields they often knew much more than the
curriculum called for, and were quite able to instruct the teacher;
the things they cared less about they helped one another out with,
so as to pass examinations. For mere proficiency in lessons they
cherished a sovereign contempt. To do anything by halves is not the
Iceland way, and it was not Niels Finsen’s. All through his life he
was impatient with second-hand knowledge and borrowed thinking. So
he worked and played through the long winters of the North. In the
summer vacations he roamed the barren hills, helped herd the sheep,
and drank in the rough freedom of the land and its people. At
twenty-one the school gave him up to the university at Copenhagen.
Training for life there was not the heyday of youthful frolicking
we sometimes associate with college life in our day and land. Not
until he was thirty could he hang up his sheepskin as a physician.
Yet the students had their fun and their sports, and Finsen was
seldom missing where these went on. He was not an athlete because
already at twenty-three the crippling disease with which he battled
twenty years had got its grip on him, but all the more he was an
outdoor man. He sailed his boat, and practised with the rifle until
he became one of the best shots in Denmark. And it is recorded that
he got himself into at least one scrape at the university by his
love of freedom.
The country was torn up at that time by a struggle between people
and government over constitutional rights, and it had reached a
point where a country parish had refused to pay taxes illegally
assessed, as they claimed. It was their Boston tea-party. A
delegation of the “tax refusers” had come to Copenhagen, where
the political pot was boiling hot over the incident. The students
were enthusiastic, but the authorities of the university sternly
unsympathetic. The “Reds” were for giving a reception to the
visitors in Regentsen, the great dormitory where, as an Iceland
student, Finsen had free lodging; but it was certain that the Dean
would frown upon such a proposition. So they applied innocently for
permission to entertain some “friends from the country,” and the
party was held in Finsen’s room. Great was the scandal when the
opposition newspapers exploited the feasting of the tax refusers
in the sacred precincts of the university. To the end of his days
Finsen chuckled over the way they stole a march on the Dean.
For two or three years after getting his degree he taught in the
medical school as demonstrator, eking out his scant income by
tutoring students in anatomy. His sure hand and clear decision
in any situation marked him as a practitioner of power, and he
had thoughts once of devoting himself to the most delicate of
all surgery,—that of the eye. He was even then groping for his
life-work, without knowing it, for it was always light, light—the
source or avenue or effect of it—that held him. And presently his
work found him.
It has been said that Finsen was a sick man. A mysterious
malady[15] with dropsical symptoms clutched him from the earliest
days with ever tightening grip, and all his manhood’s life he was a
great but silent sufferer. Perhaps it was that; perhaps it was the
bleak North in which his young years had been set that turned him
to the light as the source of life and healing. He said it himself:
“It was because I needed it so much, I longed for it so.” Probably
it was both. Add to them his unique power of turning the things
of every day life to account in his scientific research, and one
begins to understand at once his success and his speedy popularity.
He dealt with the humble things of life, and got to the heart of
things on that road. And the people comprehended; the wise men fell
in behind him—sometimes a long way behind.
[Illustration: DR. NIELS FINSEN]
In the yard of Regentsen there grows a famous old linden tree.
Standing at his window one day and watching its young leaf sprout,
Finsen saw a cat sunning itself on the pavement. The shadow of the
house was just behind it and presently crept up on pussy who got
up, stretched herself, and moved into the sunlight. In a little
while the shadow overtook her there, and pussy moved once more.
Finsen watched the shadow rout her out again and again. It was
clear that the cat liked the sunlight.
A few days later he stood upon a bridge and saw a little squad of
insects sporting on the water. They drifted down happily with the
stream till they came within the shadow of the bridge, when they at
once began to work their way up a piece to get a fresh start for a
sunlight sail. Finsen knew just how they felt. His own room looked
north and was sunless; his work never prospered as it did when he
sat with a friend whose room was on the south side, where the sun
came in. It was warm and pleasant; but was that all? Was it only
the warmth that made the birds break into song when the sun came
out on a cloudy day, made the insects hum joyously and man himself
walk with a more springy step? The housekeeper who “sunned” the
bed-clothes and looked with suspicion on a dark room had something
else in mind; the sun “disinfected” the bedding. Finsen wanted to
know what it was in the sunlight that had this power, and how we
could borrow it and turn it to use.
The men of science had long before analyzed the sunlight. They had
broken it up into the rays of different color that together make
the white light we see. Any boy can do it with a prism, and in the
band or spectrum of red, yellow, green, blue, and violet that then
appears, he has before him the cipher that holds the key to the
secrets of the universe if we but knew how to read it aright; for
the sunlight is the physical source of all life and of all power.
The different colors represent rays with different wave-lengths;
that is, they vibrate with different speed and do different work.
The red vibrate only half as fast as the violet, at the other end
of the spectrum, and, roughly speaking, they are the heat carriers.
The blue and violet are cold by comparison. They are the force
carriers. They have power to cause chemical changes, hence are
known as the chemical or actinic rays. It is these the photographer
shuts out of his dark room, where he intrenches himself behind a
ruby-colored window. The chemical ray cannot pass that; if it did
it would spoil his plate.
This much was known, and it had been suggested more than once
that the “disinfecting” qualities of the sunlight might be due
to the chemical rays killing germs. Finsen, experimenting with
earthworms, earwigs, and butterflies, in a box covered with glass
of the different colors of the spectrum, noted first that the bugs
that naturally burrowed in darkness became uneasy in the blue
light. As fast as they were able, they got out of it and crawled
into the red, where they lay quiet and apparently content. When
the glass covers were changed they wandered about until they found
the red light again. The earwigs were the smartest. They developed
an intelligent grasp of the situation, and soon learned to make
straight for the red room. The butterflies, on the other hand,
liked the red light only to sleep in. It was made clear by many
such experiments that the chemical rays, and they only, had power
to stimulate, to “stir life.” Finsen called it that himself. In the
language of the children, he was getting “warm.”
That this power, like any other, had its perils, and that nature,
if not man, was awake to them, he proved by some simple experiments
with sunburn. He showed that the tan which boys so covet was the
defence the skin puts forth against the blue ray. The inflammation
of sunburn is succeeded by the brown pigmentation that henceforth
stands guard like the photographer’s ruby window, protecting the
deeper layers of the skin. The black skin of the negro was no
longer a mystery. It is his protection against the fierce sunlight
of the tropics and the injurious effect of its chemical ray.
Searching the libraries in Copenhagen for the records of earlier
explorers in his field, and finding little enough there, Finsen
came across the report of an American army surgeon on a smallpox
epidemic in the South in the thirties of the last century. There
were so many sick in the fort that, every available room being
filled, they had to put some of the patients into the bomb-proof,
to great inconvenience all-round, as it was entirely dark there.
The doctor noted incidentally that, as if to make up for it, the
underground patients got well sooner and escaped pitting. To him
it was a curious incident, nothing more. Upon Dr. Finsen, sitting
there with the seventy-five-year-old report from over the sea in
his hand, it burst with a flood of light: the patients got well
without scarring _because_ they were in the dark. Red light or
darkness, it was all the same. The point was that the chemical rays
that could cause sunburn on men climbing glaciers, and had power to
irritate the sick skin, were barred out. Within a month he jolted
the medical world by announcing that smallpox patients treated
under red light would recover readily and without disfigurement.
The learned scoffed. There were some of them who had read of the
practice in the Middle Ages of smothering smallpox patients in
red blankets, giving them red wine to drink and hanging the room
with scarlet. Finsen had not heard of it, and was much interested.
Evidently they had been groping toward the truth. How they came
upon the idea is not the only mystery of that strange day, for
they knew nothing of actinic rays or sunlight analyzed. But Finsen
calmly invited the test, which was speedy in coming.
They had smallpox in Bergen, Norway, and there the matter was
put to the proof with entire success; later in Sweden and in
Copenhagen. The patients who were kept under the red light
recovered rapidly, though some of them were unvaccinated children,
and bad cases. In no instance was the most dangerous stage of the
disease, the festering stage, reached; the temperature did not rise
again, and they all came out unscarred.