Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/327

Rh As he goes on and the season advances he notes that "no place in Sweden is pleasanter to travel through in the summer" than the woods of pine, fir and "overflooding" (ofverflödig) birch. He says that although summer may be shorter here than anywhere else in the world, nowhere is it pleasanter, and he holds the midnight sun as not the least of nature's miracles. On midsummer day he gives praise for the beauty of summer and of spring, and for the air, the water, the green plants and the song of birds.

On this Lapland journey, Linné became fascinated with the little creeping pink-and-white twin-flower, calling it by his own name, and it has ever since been known as the linnæa (Linnæa borealis Gronovius), and even when found in the cool shades of the Adirondacks or on the pine-clad slopes of the Sierras it seems to carry with it some of the dreamy cheerfulness of the Northern midsummer.

When he gets up into the mountains, he revels in the freedom of the bracing mountain air and rejoices to find the flowers more numerous and more beautiful than he expected, and when he climbs Vallivare there is so much that is new he imagines himself in a new world. He goes through a cold driving snow-storm as he crosses over the fjäll into Norway and looks down on the landscape below:

When we at last came down what pleasure did I not find for my tired body? I came then out from a cold and frozen fjäll down into a warm and seething valley (I sat me down to eat wild strawberries [smultron]); for snow and ice I saw green plants standing in their sweetest bloom (such high grass had I never seen in any place); for violent weather a striking scent from Trifolio florente [flowering clover] and other plants. . . . I was able to cool myself with cow-milk and refresh myself with food, also to sit in a chair.

Perhaps only those who have feasted on the wild strawberries (smultron) of Scandinavia can appreciate how that little naïve touch makes the whole scene full of life. From a purely scientific point of view it might have done to have told us that as he reached a certain altitude on his descent he found certain flowers in bloom and the fruit of certain plants already ripe. But personally I am glad to have my mouth, like his, water over those smultron.

And I feel sure that he had the smultron still in mind when years afterward he rejoiced at bidding a disciple God-speed on a journey to Lapland, sending with him greetings to the Lapland fjälls and flowers, and assuring him that the trip will give him memories that will be a life-long pleasure. The joy of the fjãll comes on him again in the same way as Wordsworth's heart, filled with pleasant memories of his chance walk by the shore of Ullswater, "dances with the daffodils."

Even more noteworthy than in his travels are the expressions of his sympathetic love for nature in his scientific papers and treatises. In