Carl Linnaeus - The Father of Taxonomy “No one has been a greater botanist or zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly,
more methodically, from personal experience. No one has more completely changed a whole
science and started a new epoch.” Those were the words used to describe Carl
Linnaeus, as written by, well...Carl Linnaeus. If nothing else, the man was certainly not
shy about flaunting his accomplishments. But he might not be wrong, though. Carl Linnaeus studied botany his entire life
and became one of the most prominent experts on the subject. A prolific writer, he completely revolutionized
taxonomy, which is the science of naming and classifying biological organisms. He named and described around 16,000 different
species. The mark he left on taxonomy is still obvious
today. If you look up the scientific name of any
of the plants he described, their author is so ubiquitous that he is denoted simply by
the letter L. Early Years Carl Linnaeus was born on May 23, 1707, in
Råshult, a tiny village in the province of Småland in southern Sweden. He was the eldest of five children to Nils
Ingemarsson Linnaeus and Christina Brodersonia. His father was a church minister and an amateur
botanist who believed in the importance of a good education. Ever since Carl was a little boy, he and his
father would take trips through the garden where Nils taught him everything he knew about
plants. By age 5, Carl already had his own garden. Even as a young child, Linnaeus enjoyed remembering
the names of every plant, and we’re not talking about their common names, but the
long, complicated ones in Latin. This, however, did not impress his teachers
at school. Botany was not considered a “proper subject”
like mathematics or theology, yet Carl always prioritized his botanical studies over the
other subjects. Because of this, he was always a middling
student who wasn’t considered good enough for college by his educators. Fortunately, there was one exception - a teacher
named Johan Rothman. Besides teaching, he was also a medical doctor
and recognized that Carl’s passion for botany could parlay very well into a career in medicine. He not only encouraged Nils to put his son
on this path, but also took Carl into his home and tutored him in physiology and anatomy. In 1727, the 21-year-old Linnaeus enrolled
at the University of Lund to study medicine. He did so under his Latin name, Carolus Linnaeus,
a moniker he also used on all the papers he wrote in Latin. Later on, he also adopted the name Carl von
Linné after he became a noble, but we’re still a few decades away from that. Linnaeus’s time at Lund was brief. After just a year, he transferred to Uppsala
University because he believed they had a better botany course. As it turned out, the exact opposite was true. The course was quite poor, but this actually
worked in Carl’s favor. In just a short while, he became one of the
most knowledgeable people on botany in the entire university, teachers included. In his second year, he wrote a paper on the
reproduction of plants called Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum. It impressed one of the medical professors,
Olof Rudbeck, to the point where he considered that Linnaeus should be teaching botany, not
studying it. And so it was that, at just 23 years of age,
Carl Linnaeus became a lecturer at one of the country’s leading universities. A Trip to Lapland It was during these early years of teaching
that Carl Linnaeus began growing dissatisfied with the current system of plant classification
and started thinking of ways to improve it. He also wrote several manuscripts which would
later become the groundwork for some of his most important works such as Critica Botanica
and Genera Plantarum. However, getting them published required either
having money or a reputation and, at the moment, Linnaeus had neither so he had to wait for
a more opportune time. In 1732, the Royal Society of Sciences in
Uppsala funded a research expedition for Linnaeus to Lapland, the most northern province of
the country. By the way, this shouldn’t be confused with
the region of the same name found today in Finland which did not exist back then as the
whole of Lapland was still part of the Swedish Realm. The main goal of the expedition was to collect
and document as many plants and animals as possible in the hopes of finding new species. This trip would have imitated a similar journey
made by Rudbeck a few decades prior. Unfortunately for him, he had lost all the
extensive notes he took in a fire. Linnaeus set off on May 12, 1732, shortly
before his 25th birthday. It took him almost half a year to make the
1250-mile journey which he traveled on foot and by horse. Even though Lapland was not considered a particularly
biodiverse region, the young botanist still managed to find and collect around 100 new
plant species. His discoveries formed the basis for one of
his most important books - the Flora Lapponica. Published originally in 1737 in Amsterdam,
it was an account of all the plants that Linnaeus encountered during his trip, describing over
500 species in detail. The information in the book was significant,
but what truly made it noteworthy was the fact that Linnaeus put into practice, for
the first time, his new binomial nomenclature system which made him famous and is still
used today in taxonomy. Binomial nomenclature simply means a “two-term
naming system.” With this method, most species on the planet
can be named using only two words. These are usually in Latin, although it has
become common to use modern words, usually the names of people or places, and simply
adapt them to the Latin grammatical form. The first word - the generic name - designates
the genus of the species, the genus being a higher category into which similar organisms
can be grouped. The second term is the specific name which
is used to identify only that certain species. This method was not only easy and practical,
but it brought some much-needed order in an area that was ruled by chaos. Taxonomy had been practiced since ancient
times. Aristotle was one of the first to classify
animals by shared attributes. The science continued during medieval times
and the Renaissance, but it was incredibly confusing since many scientists liked to use
long, descriptive terms to name species. There was also no international body to officially
establish the name of a species so it was entirely possible for the same organism to
be described in multiple books under different names. The common briar rose is a good example of
this problem. In Linnaeus’s time, he found it under two
different names. One of them was Rosa sylvestris inodora seu
canina and the other was Rosa sylvestris alba cum rubore, folio glabro. Besides the fact that both refer to the same
plant, neither name is particularly easy to remember. Using Linnaeus’s method, it simply became
known as Rosa canina. To give proper credit where it is due, Linnaeus
was not the first to use only two words to name and classify plants. A Swiss botanist named Gaspard Bauhin did
it a hundred years before him. Indeed, Linnaeus was aware of his work and
even retained many names originally devised by Bauhin. However, the Swiss botanist never developed
his idea into a system which he implemented universally. Bauhin simply liked using as few words as
possible while still ensuring that they were descriptive enough to identify a species. Sometimes two words were enough but, in other
cases, he would use three or four or however many he felt were necessary. Using the Linnaean system, the specific name
did not have to describe the species. Oftentimes, it was named after a person or
a place, which meant that one word was enough to act as a unique identifier. Linnaeus would go on to further improve and
refine his system, as did scientists who came after him, but this was good enough for now. The Hydra and the Banana While writing Flora Lapponica, Linnaeus continued
to teach courses at the university in Uppsala. Technically, though, he was still a student
and, eventually, he concluded that it might be time to actually graduate. Of course, by this time, given his knowledge
and experience, graduation was merely a formality, one which he wanted to get on with as fast
as possible. Therefore, in 1735, he switched universities
again. This time, he traveled to the University of
Harderwijk in the Netherlands as it had a reputation of awarding degrees quickly. One of the oddest experiences of his life
occurred on the way to the university. He stopped off in Hamburg where he became
a guest of the burgermeister who was their equivalent of a mayor. The official wanted to show off an incredibly
rare and valuable curiosity which he had in his collection - a stuffed hydra. Allegedly, it had been killed hundreds of
years prior and looted from a church. Since it came to be in the possession of the
mayor, the Hamburg Hydra had stirred quite a bit of interest in Europe and the local
politician was simply waiting for the end of a bidding war to see who offered the highest
price for it. Linnaeus was not impressed with the oddity. He clearly saw it for what it actually was
- a fake made by gluing different animal parts together and covering them in snake scales. However, he wasn’t exactly tactful or diplomatic
in his debunking of the Hamburg Hydra. He made his observations public immediately,
also suggesting that, since it came from a church, it was most likely done to resemble
the biblical beast rather than the hydra from Greek mythology. Unsurprisingly, the value of the stuffed creature
went down the toilet and the Mayor of Hamburg found that he could no longer sell it for
a large sum of money. Feeling that he was no longer welcome, Linnaeus
took his leave and made a swift getaway out of Hamburg. The Swedish botanist arrived in Harderwijk
and got his diploma. He knew that he could graduate fast, but not
even he expected things to go as smoothly as they did. Linnaeus had already written a paper on the
causes of malaria which he submitted as his doctoral thesis. It was called “Inaugural thesis in medicine,
in which a new hypothesis on the cause of intermittent fevers is presented. By the favour of God, three times the best
and the greatest, submitted by Carolus Linnæus from Småland, Sweden, a Wredian scholar.” In it, the Swedish scientist got some things
right and some things wrong. Linnaeus opined that a common type of wormwood
called Artemisia annua would work as a remedy against malaria. This was 240 years before Chinese researcher
Tu Youyou actually extracted a compound called artemisinin from the plant and used it to
successfully make antimalarial drugs. However, he incorrectly concluded that malaria
was caused by very small clay particles because all the regions with high instances of the
illness had soil rich in clay. Either way, the university was sufficiently
impressed with the thesis and, within two weeks, Carl Linnaeus became a doctor of medicine. Also around this time in the Netherlands,
Linnaeus added another impressive, but unusual accolade to his résumé - he became the first
man to successfully grow a banana in Europe. Back then, this was a grand ambition of botanists. Many of them managed to get the banana plant
to start growing, but none could make it flower, let alone produce its delicious fruit. This was because the plant preferred a hotter
and wetter climate than what Europe could provide. Linnaeus didn’t exactly figure this right
off the bat, but he adopted a scientific and methodical approach to the problem. He knew that through trial & error he could
achieve conditions which would help the banana grow. Eventually, he gave the plant enough extra
heat and water to mimic its natural tropical climate and he was rewarded with a flowering
plant full of tasty banana fruit (which, from a botanical perspective, is technically a
berry). During his experiments, Linnaeus wrote down
extensive notes and observations and later published them so anyone else with a modicum
of horticultural skill could also recreate the conditions and grow their own bananas. Later on, he continued his studies and came
up with multiple medical applications for the fruit such as treating coughs, eye inflammations,
and bladder problems. Bizarrely, he also became convinced that the
banana was the forbidden fruit found in the Garden of Eden which was eaten by Adam and
Eve. The Systema Naturae In the Netherlands, Linnaeus met and befriended
several people who would play important roles in his career. One of them was a Dutch botanist named Jan
Frederik Gronovius. He saw one of Linnaeus’s manuscripts where
the Swedish scientist used his new binomial nomenclature and realized that it had the
potential to revolutionize botany. Gronovius encouraged Linnaeus to write and
publish his ideas. Not only that, but he helped him do it by
financing his work and by convincing a friend of his, a Scottish doctor named Isaac Lawson,
to do the same. Linnaeus always intended to publish his works,
it was just a matter of securing the money to do it. This new arrangement was a match made in heaven. And so, in 1735, Carl Linnaeus published,
arguably, his most important work - the Systema Naturae or The System of Nature. It was a book on taxonomy, highlighting his
ideas on the hierarchy of all the organisms in the world which, of course, used his own
naming system. This book became a constant presence in Linnaeus’s
life as he always kept revising and adding to it. Over the course of 30 years, he published
12 different editions of the Systema Naturae, going from a meager 12 pages for his first
edition to over 2,400 pages for his last. It was the first attempt to name all the known
organisms in the world. It was ambitious but, perhaps, too ambitious. At first, Linnaeus believed that there could
hardly be more than 10,000 species in the world. He eventually changed his tune when he realized
that he could name around 7,700 flowering plants alone. Besides simply adding more species to the
ever-growing list, Linnaeus also improved the hierarchy. His taxonomic classification had five levels. From highest to lowest, it included kingdom,
class, order, genus, and species. He considered genus and species to be natural,
God-given categories, while the other three were human constructs developed to make classification
easier. Linnaeus believed that all organisms in the
world fell into one of three kingdoms: animals, plants, and minerals. By the 10th edition of the Systema Naturae,
which is regarded by many as the definitive version, Linnaeus had divided the animal kingdom
into six classes which are, mostly, still recognizable today. They were Mammalia (which included mammals),
Aves (comprised of birds), Amphibia (containing amphibians and reptiles), Pisces (comprised
of bony fish), Insecta (which contained all arthropods), and, finally, Vermes (which included
all the other invertebrates without exoskeletons and segmented bodies like worms and molluscs). Plants were grouped into 24 classes. We won’t go into detail for each one, but
Linnaeus stressed that his classifications were done purely for identification purposes,
he did not regard them as natural groups. That kind of classification he reserved for
another book of his - the Philosophia Botanica published in 1751. For the categorizations in the Systema Naturae,
Linnaeus relied on sexual reproduction to group plants, mostly going by the number of
stamen each plant had. The stamen, by the way, is the male fertilizing
organ of the flower, the one that produces pollen. The female organ, the one with the seed, is
called the pistil. Linnaeus’s classification was quite basic. The class of flowers with one stamen was called
Monandria. The class with two stamen was Diandria. The one with three was Triandria...and so
on. There were exceptions, of course, such as
Cryptogamia which included all ferns, fungi, and algae. Linnaeus’s mineral division was far more
basic and has fallen completely out of use. He grouped them into just three classes: Petrae
for rocks, Minerae for minerals, and Fossilia for fossils and sediments. Of course, taxonomy has advanced since the
days of Linnaeus. There aren’t just five main taxonomic ranks
anymore, for example, there are eight. But even in his own time, the scientist seemed
always willing to admit his mistakes and make changes which is one of the main reasons why
the Systema Naturae had so many editions. In the first books, he classified whales as
fish, for example. Even the thing that made him famous, binomial
nomenclature, Linnaeus admitted that sometimes it was not enough so he also introduced trinomial
names or trinomens. The dog, for instance, he considered a subspecies
of the wolf, or Canis Lupus. Therefore, the domestic dog needed a subspecific
name to distinguish it so he named it Canis lupus familiaris. A more well-known example is the plains bison,
a subspecies of the American bison also known as the buffalo. Because the genus, species, and subspecies
all had the word “bison” in them, Linnaeus gave it the scientific name of Bison bison
bison. A similar example is the western lowland gorilla
who has the trinomen Gorilla gorilla gorilla, but that one wasn’t named by Linnaeus. One final interesting little tidbit from the
Systema Naturae concerns the common St. Paul’s wort or, to give it its Linnean name, Sigesbeckia
orientalis. Linnaeus ran into conflict with Johann Sigesbeck,
an academician who considered the botanist’s idea of using sexual reproduction to classify
plants as “loathsome harlotry” because God would never have allowed such deviant
behavior, referring here to all plants that had more than one male and one female reproductive
organ. As revenge, Linnaeus named the small and ugly
weed after him. Back to Sweden During his time spent in the Netherlands,
Linnaeus also made the acquaintance of George Clifford III, a Dutch banker who, as one of
the directors of the Dutch East India Company, was one of the wealthiest men in the country. More than that, though, Clifford shared Linnaeus’s
passion for botany. He owned a large estate called Hartekamp which
was famous for its massive gardens. Clifford took on Linnaeus as his personal
physician. The Swedish doctor was provided with a generous
salary, free room and board, and, of course, access to one of the most diverse gardens
in Europe. His work was not particularly taxing so Linnaeus
spent most of his time indulging his botanical interests. He even wrote a book titled Hortus Cliffortianus,
describing over 1,200 plant species that were found at Hartekamp. There’s actually a pretty funny story of
how Linnaeus came to work for Clifford. Prior to that, he was employed by a fellow
botanist named Johannes Burman who also allowed Linnaeus to stay with him. When Clifford made his offer, the Swedish
scientist was reluctant to accept as he already promised Burman to stay with him for the winter. For his part, Burman was keen to keep his
prize assistant. Clifford had to tempt him with a rare book
from his collection and persuaded Burman to trade Linnaeus for the book. During his time with Clifford, Linnaeus also
made trips to France and England. There, he befriended other notable botanists
and exchanged ideas but, more importantly, he also showed them his new naming system
which many of them adopted over the following years. In 1738, Linnaeus finally returned to Sweden. He married a woman named Sara Elisabeth Moraea
and had seven children together. He then moved to Stockholm where he found
work as a physician. While there, Linnaeus also founded the Royal
Swedish Academy of Science and became its first president. His stint in Stockholm was short as three
years later he moved to Uppsala where he became professor of botany and medicine at the university
he once attended. He was still young at this time - only in
his mid 30s - but he already settled into a nice groove which he maintained for the
rest of his life. He continued teaching and, more importantly,
writing. By the end of his career, Linnaeus had published
over 30 books, not counting all the different editions of the Systema Naturae. In 1750, he became rector of Uppsala University. Linnaeus regularly took his students on botanical
expeditions through the most remote parts of Sweden, often at the government’s expense. His most prized pupils became known as the
Apostles of Linnaeus because they went on expeditions throughout the entire world to
spread his teachings, as well as collect rare samples to bring back to the university. Carl Peter Thunberg traveled to Japan, for
example, while Pehr Kalm was the one who visited North America. Perhaps his most notable apostle was Daniel
Solander, who accompanied James Cook on his first journey to Australia. For his work, Linnaeus was knighted in 1761
by King Adolf Frederick. Since then, he took on the name Carl von Linné. In his later years, he found Uppsala too crowded
and noisy so he purchased an estate called Hammarby in the nearby countryside. Eventually, he had to resign as university
rector due to his failing health. He suffered three strokes in five years and
the last one finally killed him on January 10, 1778, aged 70. His vast collection which included tens of
thousands of plants and insects, plus thousands of books and letters was left to his family,
who later sold it to a young English botanist named James Edward Smith. Upon his return to London, the wealthy scientist
founded the Linnean Society, helping to ensure that the name Linnaeus will always be inexorably
linked to the world of natural history and taxonomy.
