Page:The Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus - Volume 1.djvu/24

 and symmetrical pyramid which has since been constructed by the brothers Grimm, by Max Müller, by our own W. D. Whitney and many other famous linguists, to take the place of that tower of Babel, which the old linguistic students had built with their clumsy hands and poor materials. In this connection I may also mention the Dane J. N. Madvig, the greatest Latin scholar of the last century, a scholar who created a new epoch in the study of the old texts. The scholars of all lands accept his views as final.

He who would write the history of electricity must study the life of the great Dane, H. C. Oersted. His discovery in 1820 of electro-magnetism—the identity of electricity and magnetism—which he not only discovered, but demonstrated incontestably, placed him at once in the highest rank of physical philosophers and has led the way to all the wonders of this subtle force. He supplied the knowledge by which Morse was enabled to build the first telegraph line, and he is in fact the predecessor of Morse, Edison, Tesla, Marconi and of that brilliant galaxy of men, who have astonished the world by all their wonderful inventions in the domain of electricity.

Suppose we cross the sound and enter the territory of Sweden. There we at once discover the polar star in the science of botany in the name of Carl von Linné. In his twenty-fourth year he established the celebrated sexual system in plants, whereby the chaos of the botanical world was reduced to order and a faithful study of it was made possible. His extensive investigations rightly secured for him the title of the king of botanists. As Linné became the father of botany, so another Swede, Carl Scheele, might be called the founder of the present system of chemistry. He is one of the greatest ornaments of science and the world is indebted to him for the discovery of many new elementary principles and valuable chemical combinations now in general use.

Hardly less conspicuous is J. J. Berzelius, the contemporary of Scheele. Like the latter Berzelius published a number of works, the most of which contained capital discoveries, either the explanation of a phenomenon or reaction pre-