Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 10, 2025
Paris, too, had honors and employment for the great botanist, but he escaped and at last reached Fahlun. He had been gone nearly four years, and during the interval had established his place in the scientific world as the first botanist of the time. "It was love that sent me out of Sweden, and but for love I would never have returned," he wrote.
A little west of Gefle is the town of Fahlun, which is the headquarters of the Kopparberg Mining Company, the, oldest industrial corporation in the world. The buildings date back to the seventeenth century and the mines are even more ancient.
Reuterholm insisted that he should attach himself to the rising little college at Fahlun. There he met Doctor Moræus, a man of much worth in a scientific way. At his house Linnæus made his home. There was a daughter in the household, Sara Elizabeth, tall, slender, appreciative and studious. One of the Reuterholms had courted her, but in vain.
Then, in order that no one should know of Gustavus's escape until it was too late to overtake him, she let him down out of the window into the sledge, which drove off at once, across a frozen lake and past the copper-mines of Fahlun, to a little village at the far end, where Gustavus left his deliverer, giving him a beautiful silver dagger as a parting gift.
The book finished, he hastened to send copies back to Fahlun to Sara Elizabeth, saying he must see Amsterdam and then go to Antwerp to visit his new-found printer-friends there, and then go home! At Amsterdam he remained a whole year, living at the house of Burman, the naturalist.
Of the celebrated copper-mines of Fahlun, some of which have been worked for 600 years, we saw nothing. We took their magnitude and richness for granted, on the strength of the immense heaps of dross through which we drove on approaching the town, and the desolate appearance of the surrounding country, whose vegetation has been for the most part destroyed by the fumes from the smelting works.
Here, in Fahlun, the exhibition was friendly; the bridal pair smiled, the bridesmaids also, and the assembled crowd laughed and shouted, hurra! In the rest of the market-place and the streets around, there was dead silence and solitude. The roseate hue of eve still shone: it passed, changed into that of morn it was the Midsummer time.
He could then return to Fahlun and take his place as a practising physician and a professor in the college, marry the lady of his choice and live happy ever afterward. So he started away southward. In due time, he arrived at Harderwijk and read his thesis to the faculty.
It was as deathly still here as if sickness and disease had lain within these dark wooden houses, and frightened the inhabitants from coming abroad; yet sickness and disease come but to few here, for when the plague raged in Sweden, the rich and powerful of the land hastened to Fahlun, whose sulphureous air was the most healthy.
The steam was pungent, and the air in here penetrated our tongues it was just as if one had a corroded spoon in one's mouth. It was really a luxury to come out again, even into the rarefied copper smoke, under the open sky. Steaming, burnt-out, and herbless as the district is on this side of the town, it is just as refreshing, green, and fertile on the opposite side of Fahlun.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking