Up till then Carl had merely been a
lodger in the house.
When he was at last on the home stretch, as it seemed, an accident
came near upsetting it all. He was stung by an adder on one of his
botanizing excursions, so far from home and help that the bite came
near proving fatal. However, Dr. Stobaeus' skill pulled him through,
and in after years he got square by labelling the serpent _furia
infernalis_--hell-fury--in his natural history. It was his way of
fighting back. All through his life he never wasted an hour on
controversy. He had no time, he said. But once when a rival made a
particularly nasty attack upon him, he named a new plant after him,
adding the descriptive adjective _detestabilis_--the detestable
so-and-so. On the whole, he had the best of it; for the names he
gave stuck.
It was during his vacation after the year at Lund that Linnaeus made
a catalogue of the plants in his father's garden at Stenbrohult that
shows us the country parson as no mean botanist himself; for in the
list, which is preserved in the Academy of Sciences at Stockholm,
are no less than two hundred and twenty-four kinds of plants. Among
them are six American plants that had found their way to Sweden. The
poison ivy is there, though what they wanted of that is hard to
tell, and the four-o'clock, the pokeweed, the milkweed, the pearly
everlasting, and the potato, which was then (1732) classed as a rare
plant.
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