Chapter Four

Mankind is above Nature

4.1 In was common practice for students in Europe to use the Latin form of their name. When Mikolay Kopernik enrolled at university in Poland he took the Latin name Nicolaus Copernicus. Another Swedish student enrolling to study medicine and botany at Lund University in 1728 took the name Carolus Linnaeus. After just one year at Lund University, he switched to Uppsala University, because he had been told the medicine and botany courses were better there. This proved to be untrue, but actually worked out well for Linnaeus, because after studying at Uppsala for a year, and writing up some of his observations on reproduction in plants, his professor formed the view that this second year student knew more about botany than the lecturers. In 1730, aged just 23, Linnaeus became a botany lecturer at Uppsala University. He turned out to be a rather good lecturer, and his lectures were popular. During this time he had grown dissatisfied with the way plant species were classified. He began making notes about how he could improve this.

4.2 In 1732 he was awarded funding for an expedition to Lapland, and from May to October that year traveled 2000 km, making observations of the native plants and birds, and geological notes. On this journey he discovered about 100 new plants. As he puzzled over how to name all these new plants in some kind of logical and elegant way, and discerning family resemblances between many of them and known species, a happy thought occurred to him. There were many more students at his University than the plants he had found, and each of them was efficiently named so as to identify which family they belonged to and distinguish them from their siblings. And there were many more universities in many countries with countless students equally efficiently named. Give these new plants names like people! Job done!!

4.3 He used this new system in the book he wrote about his new discoveries in Lapland’s plants called Flora Lapponica. Later the further happy thought came to him that he could use his new system to name animals as well as plants. It was found to be rather useful and would eventually become the Linnaean or binomial system, used by all scientists, everywhere, to name all living things, ever since.

4.4 In 1735, aged 28, Linnaeus traveled to the University of Harderwijk in the Netherlands – famous for its swiftness in awarding degrees - to get a doctoral level degree in medicine. Linnaeus had already written a thesis in Uppsala about malaria and its causes, which he submitted to Harderwijk, and within two weeks he had diagnosed a patient, defended his thesis and become a doctor of medicine. Whilst in the Netherlands Linnaeus met Gronovius, a Dutch botanist and showed him his new system of classification. Gronovius immediately saw that Linnaeus’s work could transform botany, and contacted his friend Isaac Lawson, a Scottish doctor, and together Gronovius and Lawson paid for Linnaeus’s work to be published. And so in 1737 the first edition of Systema Naturae (System of Nature) came to the world.

4.5 Over the years, Linnaeus continued to develop his ideas and add new species so that Systema Naturae grew in a period of about 30 years from 12 outsize pages in its first edition to 2400 pages in its twelfth edition. This was the first serious attempt ever made to document all of the planet’s species. It was a huge effort. Linnaeus took the apparently chaotic natural world and organized it, making it easier for everyone to grasp it and understand it, and in doing so invented a new science – taxonomy. Linnaeus classified living things by looking for family resemblances. For example he would look at the teeth of different mammals to decide if they were related.

4.6 Linnaeus loved his job. He immediately undertook a one-month long visit to the Swedish island of Gotland with some of his new students, where together they discovered 100 new plant species. Then, in summertime, he would take his botany students on walks around Uppsala to observe and record the plant and animal life they could find. This was almost a return to his early boyhood enthusiasm for plants, when he walked freely in the countryside around his village searching for plants. When he had given his first lectures in Uppsala as a 23 year-old student, they had been popular. Now, as an older professor, his lectures were more popular than ever – and he held some of them in the botanical garden. His students were captivated by Linnaeus’s enormous enthusiasm for botany and nature.

4.7 Linnaeus returned to Sweden in 1738, becoming a physician in the nation’s capital city, Stockholm, helping to found the Royal Swedish Academy of Science and becoming its first president. In 1741, aged 34, Linnaeus returned to Uppsala University and became a full professor of medicine, taking control of botany, natural history and the university’s botanical garden. In 1753, Linnaeus published his natural science masterpiece in two volumes and 1200 pages: Species Plantarum (Plant Species). In this work, he listed all of the plant species that had been discovered at that time – almost 6000 – and classified them into about 1000 appropriate genera. This enabled him to use two-part names for all plants throughout Species Plantarum – the first time all plants had been named in this way.

4.8 Many of the plants in the two volumes had been discovered by Linnaeus’s own students. A select group of his best students (who became known as the Apostles) traveled the world spreading the word about Linnaeus’s two-part naming system, and describing new plant species, many of which they sent as specimens back to Linnaeus in Uppsala. The Apostles traveled to wild and remote places. Out of 17 Apostles, 7 died on expeditions. Linnaeus’s idea of going on expeditions to study nature and gather specimens inspired one Alexander van Humboldt as we shall see and other characters in our history, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace.

4.9 In 1758, Linnaeus published the tenth edition of Systema Naturae in which he classified all of the animal kingdom into genera and gave all of the species two-part names. During his career, Linnaeus named about 13,000 life forms and classified them into suitable categories such as mammals, birds, fish, primates, canines, etc.

4.10 Carolus Linnaeus was knighted by the King of Sweden in 1761 and took the nobleman’s name of Carl von Linné. Linnaeus died on his farm 10 km from Uppsala, called Hammarby. Today Hammarby is a museum which features exhibitions of Linnaeus’s work, his botanical collections, and a garden and a park where his love of the natural world has been preserved.

4.11 Linnaeus was to say of himself, famously: “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.” From anyone else this would sound perhaps a little vain. But Linnaeus had spent his whole life classifying life forms by their family resemblances and differences. Here he is merely repeating this process of classification but applied to himself, precisely, factually, and, as was his custom, accurately.

4.12 And now, at last, we come to the point of this digression. By the simple expedient of developing a common nomenclature for the entire natural world Linnaeus profoundly changed man’s conception of his relationship with nature. Linnaeus was the first person to place humans in the primate family and to describe bats as mammals rather than birds. Linnaeus did not categorize humans alongside apes with any idea of an evolutionary link. He did it with the same reasoning he used to categorize all life, which was similarities he identified between species. But as a result Man was no longer separate and above Nature. Man and Nature were now, literally, part of one big taxonomic family.

4.13 But enormous as his achievement was, Linnaeus work was at the same time consciously limited. Family resemblances were observed but causes of these relationships remained a mystery. His critics would talk dismissively of his work as being superficial - his classification described but did not explain. But his focus on accurate naming was far from intellectually superficial – it was as profound as the greatest scientific discoveries. That a rose by any other name would smell as sweet was a poetic insight into the nature of language. But a rose by any other name would not lend itself so easily to investigation by a community of scientists.

4.14 Linnaeus established a firm foundation for the scientific investigation of all nature. His naming system enabled scientists anywhere, in any language, to communicate their discoveries through the printed word. It enabled the accumulation of precise data which in turn could be referenced by all other scientists in their work. It also inspired a huge effort of discovery, the hunt for new species to name which added more and more data to the accumulated knowledge of mankind. In short it created the platform upon which others could develop their theories about the underlying laws of Nature.

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