Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/77

VI ] King made Cronhjelm sit down at the royal desk and write it in duplicate. "So that they who sought the worst for me were glad they had come out of the matter with honor and reputation, so nearly had they burned their fingers."

Emanuel was to learn that those are expensive satisfactions, no matter how just, especially since Cronhjelm, already powerful, was after Charles's death to become the equivalent of prime minister. But for the present Charles was alive, an absolute monarch, and, although tight about money, delighted to talk science with Emanuel. Nor was there any immediate question of taking up his work at the Board of Mines; there was plenty of other work. Polhem and Emanuel occupied themselves, with royal favor and little salary, in trying to start new industries in the impoverished country.

The King had read an article in Daedalus about how to get salt from the sea. Sweden had been importing it. Emanuel was told to establish salt-works. He was also busy with calculations for the great Carlscrona dry-dock. Emanuel had been put up by Benzelius to suggest to Charles that an inland waterway from Stockholm to the Kattegat would be a good idea, so the King had ordered Polhem and Swedberg to look into this, the forerunner of the modern Göta Canal.

The two engineers traveled strenuously about the country, looking at suitable sites, considering financial ways and means, running into endless difficulties, but the Carlscrona dam did get built, and the canal was started. Something might come of the salt-works too, Emanuel thought, "if selfishness does not rule too powerfully."

He was beginning to discover other than material obstacles to his practical work, but on the whole he was so happy in functioning that when Benzelius told him he had a chance to be named the professor of astronomy at Upsala he was "a thousandfold grateful," but declined to apply. "My genius," he wrote to this intimate friend, "is mechanics and shall likewise be chemistry." Furthermore, he could be "of greater practical use to the fatherland" where he was.

As he had told Benzelius once, he thought that for every ten mathematicians there ought to be one practical man to bring them to market. He felt himself to be that man.

But on November 30, 1718, Charles XII was killed by a rather mysteriously fired bullet in the Norwegian campaign. Emanuel's