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The King of Flowers

Carl Linnaeus, 1707-1778

By Claes Britton

The great Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus can claim many magnificent honours. He was, beyond doubt, one of the most influential scientists in history, crucial to our present day understanding of how the species on this planet relate to one another, and widely acclaimed as one of the most important progenitors of Charles Darwin. Linnaeus, who was trained and practised as a physician, was the first ever to define the human being as an animal among other animals, naming it Homo sapiens.

As such, Carl Linnaeus is surely the most famous Swede of all times internationally, and something of a forefather of contemporary Swedish science. Linnaeus was also the foremost explorer of the vast country of Sweden. He travelled extensively, meticulously studying and classifying the nature, people and culture of region after region, starting with his famous voyage to remote subpolar Lapland. As Linnaeus was also a brilliant and powerful author, his records of these travels, as well as other writings, are living classics, still widely read today.

It is also fair to say that Carl Linnaeus, more than any other single person, implanted in our national soul that very special relationship with nature that we Swedes continue to experience so profoundly to this day.

As a genius far ahead of his times, Carl Linnaeus was unusual in that he achieved world-wide fame during his lifetime, and at a young age. In his old age, natural scientists from around the world pilgrimaged to his home, Hammarby near Uppsala in the province of Uppland, to listen to the "King of Flowers", see his famous garden and undertake excursions in the local countryside.

”Even from a humble cottage, a great man may emerge”
Carl Linnaeus, of course speaking about himself

 

Carl Linnaeus was born in Råshult parish in the southern Swedish province of Småland on 23 May 1707. His father Nils Linnaeus was a vicar, first in Råshult, later in nearby Stenbrohult. It was his father who passed on to his son his own passion for plants and gardening.

 

Legend has it that young Carl ingested a love of plants and flowers already in the womb, as his mother Christina Brodersonia feasted her eyes on the magnificent and unusual flowers in her husband's garden during her pregnancy. Carl Linnaeus wrote poetically himself about being born "just when the spring was at its loveliest and the cuckoo was proclaiming summer" - in May, that is. According to the myth, his cradle was garlanded with luscious flowers.

Young Carl was sent to primary school in the regional capital Växjö, where he was reputed to be a "lacklustre" student. However, a teacher - the first of the many mentors and sponsors Linnaeus was to depend on throughout his career - saw his exceptional talents for botany and convinced the boy's parents that he should pursue a career as a doctor rather than entering the clergy as they had planned (botany, in those days, was a part of the medical faculty).

 

Carl eventually entered the medical school in Lund, in southern Sweden, but moved a year later to Sweden´s most ancient and prestigious university in Uppsala, north of Stockholm. He was to remain there for seven years as a protegé of the university´s famous dean, Olof Rudbeck the Younger.

The Uppsala academic tradition of the time was rooted in the Baroque "mechanical" view of the world that went back to Newton (even if Linnaeus himself struggled to understand Newton's physics). Another important influence was the heritage from the Swedish Great Power era of the 17th century, when Olof Rudbeck the Elder in his book Atlantican, set out his extraordinary patriotic theory that the origins of the entire world could be traced back to ancient Scandinavia, indeed to Uppsala!

This boundless self-assertion, paired with a Herculean ambition to understand and classify everything in its entirety - not just the Earth, but the entire Universe - were to remain Linnaeus´ two main driving forces throughout his life and career. His own professional ambition was indeed monumental: to list and order the whole of Creation. A quote from Linnaeus himself says it all: "Before the age of 23, I had thought out everything".

The fearless explorer

In 1732, while still a student, Linnaeus embarked on the first and most spectacular of his many scientific excursions through Sweden - to the vast, foreign and mythological northern wilderness of Lapland. Olof Rudbeck the Younger had conducted the first scientific expedition ever there in the late 17th century and had illustrated a famous bird book which inspired Linnaeus.

Linnaeus travelled alone, on foot and horseback, following the eastern coastline of Sweden all the way up to Luleå. He then crisscrossed the harsh Lapland mountains before continuing east, around the Gulf of Bothnia and down Finland´s west coast, eventually sailing back to Sweden by way of the Åland archipelago. In five months he covered some 2,000 kilometers, alone and at tremendous personal risk.

The Flora Laponica, published in 1737, was the rich scientific fruit of the expedition. The voyage also had a lasting effect on Linnaeus personally. Living with the Sami (Lapps) in the grimly scenic northern wastes convinced him once and for all of the superiority of the simple life over cosmopolitan civilisation. The Lapp costume, complete with drum, which he later carried with him on his European travels, became something of a trademark.

In subsequent years, the Lapland expedition was followed by more or less annual, somewhat less strenuous and dramatic summertime journeys to many other regions of the country, most in the company of assistants and ‘apostles', all resulting in extensive narratives not only documenting flora and fauna but also people and customs. His highly expressive, if not to say explicit, literary style has made these chronicles an indispensable treasure of the Swedish literary and historical heritage, still much read to this day.

God created, Linnaeus ordered
attributed to Linnaeus

In order to qualify for a doctorate in medicine, Linnaeus was obliged to travel abroad. As was customary among Swedish doctoral students at the time, he went to Holland for his disputation. With him he took the first manuscript of his pioneering magnum opus Systema Naturae - a classification system for plants, animals, stones and minerals, based on his studies of the plants in the university garden in Uppsala, in the surrounding countryside, and his travels in Lapland and elsewhere.

This classification was based, in the case of the plants, on their sexual characteristics, a concept which had been originally proposed in the 17th century but was still far from generally accepted. The animals were classified according to a variety of criteria, while stones and minerals were ordered after their external characteristics. All species in Linnaeus' system were divided into strict hierarchies, starting with the largest and ending with the smallest. The entire system in many ways resembled the organisation of an army - perhaps explained by the fact that Linnaeus had grown up during wartime - and he himself often referred to it in such terms. As Linnaeus - unlike Darwin - remained a good Christian until his death, he naturally placed man at the top of the hierarchy, as the jewel in the crown of the Creation. He was, nevertheless, the first scientist ever, in 1758, to draw the bold and sensational conclusion that the human race should be placed in the same order as the apes, naming it Homo sapiens, of the order of Primates.

Behold... the teeth, the hand and fingers, and you will see how relatively closely we are related to the baboons and apes, indeed the satyrs of the forest.
Carl Linnaeus - the first to relate the human being to apes.

In Amsterdam, Linnaeus met a wealthy natural historian named Johannes Burman - another of his many benefactors - who helped him publish the first edition of Systema Naturae in 1735. It was a slim, 12-page volume which today would command astronomic prices if it were to turn up at auction. It quickly gained Linnaeus the international reputation that would continue to grow throughout his career. He also published numerous other works in Amsterdam. Linnaeus was enormously productive throughout his career - a virtual one-man scientific industry and publishing house.

Systema Naturae, however, remained the core of the Linnaean project. He continued to expand and elaborate his mighty system in ever new editions. The 12 pages of the first edition grew to 2,300 pages in the twelfth (1766-68), encompassing some 15,000 species. Classifying and naming such a large number of species was a formidable, almost incomprehensible achievement. Yet, as Linnaeus himself knew, it was only a small beginning. By the end of the 18th century, the estimated number of species on Earth was already around one million. Today, scientists estimate that there could be as many as 30 to 40 million individual species on this planet, the majority of which will never be mapped or named.

Many of Linnaeus' methods for classifying species, including, to some extent, that based on the sexual characteristics of plants, have been dismissed by modern science. Nevertheless, through the centuries, the Linnaean system of classification has proved enduringly useful as a scientific tool for use in the mapping and understanding of the natural world. This is true not least for Linnaeus´ system for naming species. In the early versions of Systema Naturae, he used longer Latin names. From Species Plantarum in 1753, however, he simplified the naming principle by using only two-word names, as in Homo sapiens - the binomial system upon which all biological naming is based to this day. Many of Linnaeus´ names have since been changed but far more have survived, many with the simple suffix "L." - a letter which every scientist knows stands for Linnaeus.

Carl Linnaeus stayed on the European continent for some five years, based in Holland but travelling also to England, France and Germany. His success had already made him a big name, and he could very easily have stayed to pursue a glittering international career. Instead, he returned to Sweden in 1738, as legend has it to be united with the fiancée, Sara Lisa Moraea, who had been waiting patiently for him during his years abroad. His international reputation continued to grow but he himself was never again to set foot outside his native land.

The master and his apostles

Back in Sweden, Linnaeus practised as a physician in Stockholm for a couple of years, biding his time before eventually being appointed professor in Uppsala, where he would remain for three decades, producing a seemingly endless stream of new scientific books and articles.

Linnaeus was a founding member of Sweden´s Royal Academy of Sciences, and a member of many other prestigious scientific academies, both in Sweden and on the continent. Above all, he was a passionate and charismatic teacher. He tutored no fewer than 186 dissertions, nearly all written by himself! In the summertime, he conducted the provincial tours with his students which were to establish his reputation at home.

Linnaeus' international reputation, on the other hand, was cemented not only by his prolific publishing but also by the "apostles", his closest circle of pupils, whom he sent out on pioneering journeys of exploration around the world. From the Arctic Ocean to the South Pacific they braved untold perils, collecting and mapping species in the spirit of their mentor, some of them perishing as a result of their endeavours. Two of these apostles, Anders Sparrman and Daniel Solander, sailed around the world with James Cook, as predecessors of Charles Darwin, who would circumnavigate the same world with HMS Beagle more than half a century later.

Carl Linnaeus died on 10 January 1778, after a lengthy period of deteriorating health. A series of strokes had affected his memory, leaving him still able to enjoy his own writings, but, poignantly, unable to comprehend that he was their author.

A modern sense of order, a wild and ancient imagination

Like many other geniuses, Linnaeus had a strong imaginative and speculative side to his brilliant mind. His writings are littered with bizarre and entertaining theories and philosophies. He was convinced, for example, that the entire Earth had once been covered by oceans, except for one island, Paradise, located on the Equator. His theory was that all organisms had spread from this island as the land successively rose from the sea. He believed in the mermaid as a missing link between man and beast, and expressed optimism about the chances of finding a specimen of this rare species to dissect. He believed that God punishes those with weak morals already during their lifetimes. He also believed that an infant conceived by a black man and a white woman would be born with a white body and a black penis, and that swallows, rather than migrating in the winter, actually hibernated at the bottom of Swedish lakes.

Such ancient, religiously and superstitiously coloured persuasions stood in the sharpest possible contrast to his strikingly modern observations, primarily on the life of plants. Linnaeus was, first and foremost, a divinely gifted botanist, with a unique sense of order and the ability to see the widest perspectives. He could be said to have single-handedly constructed a platform on which modern natural science could be built. He also created his own Linnaean language (in Latin) which is still used in science nomenclature today.

After his death, the Linnean Society of London was formed, based on Linnaeus' unique collections which had been sold to an English collector by his widow. Soon afterwards, the Societée Linnéenne in Paris was founded, which was to flourish after the French revolution of 1789. Both institutions have been instrumental in the evolution of modern natural science.

Photo: Teddy Thörnlund, Uppsala University art collection, Lund University Library, Växjö City Library, Sören Hallgren and the Linnaeus Museum, Sören Hallgren and the Linnaeus Museum, Sören Hallgren and the Linnaeus Museum, Åbo Academy´s picture collection, Åbo Academy´s picture collection, Centre for the history of science, Olle Norling, Upplandsmuseet, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

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