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Botany’s ‘father’ has a major birthday next week
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God created, Linnaeus organized.
That was the motto of trailblazing botanist Carl Linnaeus. Wednesday is the 300th anniversary of his birth.
Linnaeus is hardly a household name, yet the plants and animals of the world were either named directly by him, or indirectly through the system of classification and nomenclature he established. HIs contribution to science, especially botany, can scarcely be overestimated.
When he began his studies, plants were named by long, descriptive Latin phrases that varied from author to author. Hopelessly unwieldy, the practice resulted in chaos and confusion among botanists.
Linnaeus devised a system for classifying plants based on their sexual parts. He organized all plants into 24 classes according to the number of stamens (male parts). The classes in turn were broken down into orders depending on the number of pistils (female parts). Orders were winnowed into genera according to the relationship of stamens and pistils, and finally narrowed to the individual, or species level.
Linnaeus also established that an organism would be known by a two-word, or binomial, title consisting of genus name followed by species name; that would be its only name worldwide.
Linnaeus’ sexual system eventually was replaced by one that took more botanical features into account, and his categories were expanded. But his was the first consistent, practical system. By sheer force of personality and output he goaded the scientific world into getting a handle on its information.
The son of a clergyman in southern Sweden, Linnaeus was expected to study theology, but the natural world was all that interested him. As a compromise he wound up at the University of Uppsala to study medicine, which was closely allied with botany at the time.
His work brought him in contact with two influential scholars. One of them, Olaus Rudbeck, for whom Linnaeus later named the genus Rudbeckia, (think Black-eyed Susan and Purple Coneflower) made Linnaeus his temporary adjunct in botany at age 23.
Linnaeus first made waves by demonstrating beyond a scientific doubt that plants reproduce sexually. The idea of rampant sex in the flower bed, combined with his sexual classification of plants, was too much for some in the community of scholars. The botanist Johann Siegesbeck denounced Linnaeus’ notions as “loathsome harlotry.” Linnaeus responded by naming a common weed after his detractor.
Linnaeus moved to Holland in 1735 where the University of Harderwijk granted him a medical degree after he published his botanical notes in Latin. The entire process took six days.
Linnaeus stayed in Holland for three years, publishing the first editions of his major works and meeting the leading botanists in Europe and England, as well as establishing contact with plant explorers and collectors in North America.
Returning to Sweden in 1739, he married his longtime fiancee, Sara Elisabeth Morea, and began practicing medicine in Stockholm. He lamented that he was so unknown there that nobody would trust him to treat even the family dog. Fortunately, he was appointed professor of medicine at Uppsala two years later. Once there, he traded places with the professor of botany.
The household must have been chaotic. Carl and Sara Lisa Linnaeus had seven children, five of whom lived to adulthood. Admiring students crowded into their home to listen to Linnaeus’ private lessons, which he often delivered in his dressing gown and nightcap.
Linnaeus emulated the kindness of his early benefactors by giving some of his students room and board. He loved to lead summer field trips into the countryside. He and his students would spend the day collecting plants and animals, and then parade back into town, singing, and playing horns and drums. Linnaeus liked his drink, but wrote that he was never drunk.
Many of his students, whom he called his “apostles,” went all over the world collecting and studying plants. Amid all this activity Linnaeus reorganized and expanded the university’s botanical garden, and continued to publish revisions of his works.
Nowadays Linnaeus has the reputation of being bawdy, even lewd. However, what may appear to us as obscenity was what things actually were called 300 years ago. Linnaeus wrote in Swedish about his excursions throughout his country, and the freshness and color of his language makes him a literary figure as well as a scientist. He was given the title of nobility by the King of Sweden in 1757.
Crippling depression was the flip side of Linnaeus’ energy and vanity, and his last years were marred by sickness and a sense of failure. Although the self-crowned “Prince of Botany” died in 1778 in a feeble and embittered state, his work lives on in all our biology texts, seed catalogs and garden books.
Resources
• “Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778).” University of California Museum of Paleontology. www.ucmp.berkeley.edu
• Linne on line. Uppsala University:
www.linnaeus.uu.se/online/history/index
• Michon Scott. “Linnaeus.”:
www.strangescience.net/linn.htm
• Kuhn & Kesser. “The Polemics between Carl Linnaeus and Johan Georg Siegesbeck.”
www.scricciolo.com/linnaeus_polemic.htm
• Sandra Knapp. “What’s in a name? A History of Taxonomy”; Natural History Museum
www.nhm.ac.uk/index.html
• Louise Petrusson: “Carl Linnaeus.” Swedish Museum of Natural History
www2.nrm.se/fbo/hist/linnaeus/linnaeus.html.en
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