Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/55

IV ] to his soldiers, Go and fight, but who said, Come! and took the lead." 17

They fell frozen off their horses, they were killed, they died of disease. Charles, illimitably stubborn, sent home for many more men, much more money. The country, never rich, was being drained and depopulated.

Good and sensible men, like Emanuel's brother-in-law Eric Benzelius, must have wondered how Sweden was to be built up again. What about the badly utilized mineral resources? What about building up young scientists? It was the progressive Benzelius who urged Emanuel to follow his bent and go to study science in England.

But the Bishop sat on the money-bags quite contentedly—not a bit so irritated by having money as a miser ought to be, according to the maxims of Publilius.

The "graduation exercises" at Upsala ended in June, 1709. On July 13, Emanuel felt sure he would be leaving for England in fourteen days. But on March 6, nine months later, he was still in his father's house at Brunsbo, writing to his "Highly honored D:Brother-in-Law," Eric Benzelius, "I have very little desire to remain longer in this place, since I am wasting my time here almost in vain. Yet I have so improved myself in music that I can act as organist, but in other branches of science there is very little to offer here, nor do those who are here hold it in any esteem, so that I might be encouraged thereby." 18

He had watched the local bookbinder and bound three books in leather himself; he had written Latin verses and had them printed at the Skara Press; he had collected everything collectable, including an ancient coin for Benzelius and the bones of a whale for the museum at Upsala. And he had begun a lifetime of methodically making notes. Anything which brought in mathematics, such as astronomy, optics, physics, statics, was then called "mathesis," and mathesis was what he took notes on, turning his intense mind wholly on the exact sciences.

He wrote to Benzelius that since with d:brother's advice and approval he had chosen these studies, he meant to continue the collection of such items in the foreign countries he was going to