Life, Times and

Work
of Carl Linnaeus

“God cr eated, Linnaeus organized.”

Carl Linnaeus
 French-Genevan writer philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau known to
have nothing good to say about anyone once told a Swedish visitor,

“So you know my master, my teacher, the great Linnaeus! Tell him that I know of
no man on earth who is greater than he. Tell him that I owe him my health and my life.”

To understand why Rousseau held Linnaeus in high regard, it is

necessary to learn about the life and contributions of this Swedish scientist, Carl
Linnaeus.

Carl Linnaeus was the elder son of Nils Linnaeus, a Lutheran clergyman,
and Christina Brodersonius. Born on 23 May 1707, he grew up in the
marshlands and meadows of Stenbrohult in Småland, Sweden. Since young,
Linnaeus was taught gardening, Latin and geography by his father who was an
amateur botanist and avid gardener. Linnaeus loved to do work with Nils in the
latter’s rectory garden which to Linnaeus, “inflamed my mind from infancy
onwards with an unquenchable love of plants”1. He constantly asked Nils about
the plants’ names but frequently forgot them. This vexed Nils who threatened
never to give any more names unless Linnaeus remembered them. Linnaeus
was only five-year old when he set to remember the entire botanical names.

Linnaeus was an average student who preferred being outdoors than

studying indoors. His high school teacher, Dr Johan Rothman personally
instructed him in botany and principles of medicine. He taught Linnaeus plant
classification according to Joseph Pitton de Tournefort’s system and introduced
him to plant sexuality according to Sebastien Vaillant’s Sermo de structura
florum (1717). Linnaeus’ parents wanted him to become a clergyman. However,
his academic results weren’t good enough for him to enter the clergy. Rothman
suggested to Nils that Linnaeus should be a doctor and that his passion for
plants will help him as medicines were synthesized from plants. Thus, Linnaeus
studied to be a physician.

1
Written by Linnaeus, in his 1745 Öland and Gotland journal

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 In August 1727, Linnaeus entered the University of Lund. He befriended
physician–naturalist Dr Kilian Stobaeus who provided him free food and
lodging. Stobaeus encouraged Linnaeus’ passion for botany, lent him books and
showed him his herbarium, which inspired him to create his personal
herbarium. He stopped his medical studies when he fell ill in May 1728.

Linnaeus continued his medical studies in University of Uppsala from

1728 to 1731. He worked in the university botanical garden where he met and
impressed theology professor Dr Olaf Celsius with his botany knowledge.
Celsius offered Linnaeus lodging and the use of his library. In return, Linnaeus
gifted his paper on plant pollination Praeludia sponsaliorum plantarum to
Celsius. The latter showed the paper to medical botany professor Dr Olof
Rudbeck the Younger, who was impressed with it. Rudbeck subsequently
appointed Linnaeus, then a second-year undergraduate, as a part-time botany
lecturer. Linnaeus’ lectures were popular, often attracting a large audience.
Pleased with Linnaeus’ successes, Rudbeck invited Linnaeus to tutor his
children. Despite holding two jobs, Linnaeus still found time for botany work.
When he discovered that many plants did not fit into the existing classification
system, he developed a new system and worked towards reorganizing taxonomy.
He was only 23 years old then.

Rudbeck inspired Linnaeus with stories of his collecting trip in 1696 to

Lapland. Thus, Linnaeus undertook a similar exploration to Lapland in 1732. It
made a lasting impression on him and nurtured his belief that if foreign crops
could acclimatize and be grown locally, they could be engine of Sweden’s
economic growth.

Linnaeus’ goal was to be a botany professor, which required him to attain

a medical qualification from a foreign university 2 . He decided to study in
Holland as it was a highly respected place for studying natural history3 and an
important centre for printing.

2
Medical degrees were not granted in Sweden then due to professional conflict between
university professors and Stockholm doctors.
3 Blunt (2001), pp.78–79.

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 In 1733, he spent Christmas in Falun with his fellow student Claes
Sohlberg’s family. In Falun, he made friends with Governor of Dalaerna, Baron
Nils Reuterholm and his chaplain Johannes Browallius who was a botanist. He
also met Sara Elisabeth Moraea, whom he got engaged to in January 1735. The
Governor commissioned him to make a natural history study of Dalearna and
invited Linnaeus to stay in Falun to tutor his sons.

After his engagement to Sara Elisabeth, he left for Holland where he

stayed for over three years. At University of Harderwijk, Linnaeus succeeded in
obtaining a Dutch medical diploma within 8 days. He became acquainted with
botanist Dr Johan Gronovius, who was so impressed with Linnaeus’ manuscript
describing his taxonomic system that he sponsored Linnaeus’ printing costs. In
1735, Linnaeus published his ground-breaking work Systema Naturae, which
presented the hierarchical classification, or taxonomy, of the three kingdom of
natures: animals, vegetables and minerals. It advanced the study of botany and
set the foundation for biological nomenclature. Its 10th edition (1758) was the
starting point for zoological nomenclature. In 1736, he published Fundamenta
Botanica which expounded his ideas for reforming botanical taxonomy. The
following year, he published Critica botanica with a discursus by Browallius. It
presented a series of definite rules for making names short, unambiguous,
euphonious and memorable4. In 1737, he published Flora Lapponica based on
his travels to Lapland earlier in 1732.

Linnaeus was a great networker who made many friends in Sweden and
abroad. During his stay in Holland, he travelled to UK, Brabant and France
and met fellow scientists, naturalists, botany students and botanical artists
there. In UK, he won over the English botanists who didn’t want to like him as
he was turning the nomenclature system upside down. Although Linnaeus did
not speak English, he could converse in Latin. He made time to correspond
with his contacts and built a vast network of correspondents during his
lifetime. These international contacts were useful to him as they provided him
with seeds and specimens from all over the world.

4https://www.alvin-portal.org/alvin/attachment/document/alvin-record:215323/ATTACHMENT-
0007.pdf

PAGE 3
 In 1735, he befriended banker-businessman George Clifford who was
introduced to him by his close friend, renowned naturalist Dr Hermann
Boerhaave. Clifford hired him to curate his botanical and zoological garden in
his estate, the Hartekamp in Leiden and serve as his personal physician. Two
years later, Linnaeus collaborated with Clifford and botanical artist Georg
Dionysius Ehret to produce Hortus Cliffortianus, a catalogue of the species in
Hartekamp.

Returning to Sweden in 1738, Linnaeus went to Stockholm to start a

medical practice to prove to his fiance’s father that he was able to support his
daughter. Soon after, he had Swedish Queen Ulrika and other important
Swedish people seeing him. Within a year, he showed that he could comfortably
support a wife and was allowed to marry Sara Elisabeth in June 1739. After
marriage, he returned to his medical practice in Stockholm. Linnaeus had seven
children with Sara Elisabeth of which only five survived to adulthood.

Linnaeus became a successful physician. However, he was determined

to be a botanist. In 1739, he became a co-founder of Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences. When the Uppsala university professor of medicine retired, Linnaeus
was appointed to succeed him in May 1941. Before he and his family moved to
Uppsala, he led an expedition to Öland and Gotland to source for minerals and
plants for ethnobotanical uses by the government. Linnaeus returned to
Uppsala University in October 1741. In 1742, he switched jobs with the current
botany professor and finally achieved his goal to be the Uppsala professor of
botany. He held this position for the next 30 years and became the rector of
Uppsala University in 1750.

Linnaeus was a charismatic, inspirational and popular teacher and

mentor. He often organized botanical excursions around Uppsala, sometimes
with several hundred participants. He sent many students, popularly called
Linnaeus’ Apostles, on expeditions around the world to collect exotic plants for
acclimatization in Sweden. As his system allowed new plants to be fitted into
the framework of known plants, it further spurred scientists to find new
specimens.

PAGE 4
 The most well-known apostles included Peter Kalm, who travelled
through North America between 1748 and 1751; Daniel Solander, who
accompanied explorer James Cook on his first HMS Endeavour voyage from
1768 to 1771; and Carl Peter Thunberg, who reached Japan in 1776. These
apostles' expeditions helped to promote Linnaean taxonomy to the world.
English naturalist and patron of natural sciences Sir Joseph Banks, who greatly
admired Linnaeus, started the tradition of having a naturalist aboard all British
research ships. Thus Linnaeus’ apostles had a direct influence on future
expeditions including Charles Darwin's expedition aboard HMS Beagle5.

In 1751, Linnaeus published Philosophia Botanica, which was

considered to be "the first textbook of descriptive systematic botany and
botanical Latin"6. His most famous work, Species Plantarum was published in
1752. Botanists accepted the binomial names in this work as the starting point
for botanical nomenclature.

In 1761 Linnaeus was granted a Swedish ennoblement and became

known as Carl von Linné. He were plagued with illnesses during his last few
years and died on 10 January 1778. At the time of his death, he was regarded
as one of the most acclaimed scientists of the time, whose works in botany,
biology and ethnography significantly influenced European sciences.

In 1784, Linnaeus’s widow sold his library of 1600 volumes, over 4000
letters from correspondence, and circa 300 manuscripts; and his entire
collection of 19000 plants, 3198 insects, 1564 shells to James Edward Smith. In
1788, Smith founded the Linnaean Society which is still based in Burlington
House, London today.

Linnaeus’ contributions to the world were immeasurable. He was the

first scientist to merge a hierarchical classification system from kingdom to
species and consistently using it to identify every plant and animal species. He
created his sexual classification system by grouping flowers into 24 classes
based on the number and position of their stamens and dividing the classes into

5 Blunt (2001), p.184

6 Stearn (1983), p.36

PAGE 5
orders based on the pistils. Orders were divided into genera by the form of the
fruit.

Before Linnaeus, taxonomic names were a series of lengthy words.

Linnaeus gave each kind of plant and animal just two names. The first name
identified the genus (group) to which the plant or animal belonged. The second
name described the species within that group. This system which simplified the
naming of living things became known as binomial system of nomenclature.
Interestingly, Linnaeus named plants after his friends and benefactors, many
of whom inspired, supported and helped Linnaeus during his lifetime e.g.
Artedia, Rothmannia, Stobaea, Celsia, Gronovia, Cliffortia, Burmannia and
Boerhavia. This method of commemorative plant naming was his way of
repaying their generosity which he wasn’t able to do so with money. By using
Latin (or neo-Latin) for scientific names, botany was simplified and made
accessible to the masses including non-scientists, amateur gardeners, women
and the working class.

Linnaeus was a prolific writer. Other than writing works on botany,

Linnaeus had written and published other scientific studies. As a medical
student in Uppsala, he and fellow student Peter Artedi planned to jointly study
and document the entire natural world. After Artedi accidentally drowned in
1735, Linnaeus continued to work on this project. In 1738, he eventually
published a monograph on fish, Ichthyologia sive opera omnia de piscibus,
based on Artedi’s unfinished manuscript.

Linnaeus’ physico-theological writings, Oeconomia Naturae (1749) and

Politiae Naturae (1760) were influential and of great importance to Charles
Darwin. His studies of plant hybridization influenced the experimental
tradition that led directly to the pea plant experiments of Austrian botanist
Gregor Mendel7.

Linnaeus made some lasting impact on geology, mineralogy, entomology

through the various editions of Systema Naturae; on pathology by the
classification of diseases laid down in Genera Morborum (1763); on

7 Rogers (2010), p.97

PAGE 6
pharmacology as a result of Materia Medica (1749); on physiology through his
writings on plant sexuality and embryology8. These topics were also treated in
dissertations by Linnaeus’ students published in Amoenitates Academicae
(1749). In 1745, he inverted Anders Celsius’ temperature scale created earlier in
1742, to its present standard. The original scale had the boiling point at 0 °C
and freezing point at 100 °C 9 . He was first scientist to classify humans as
primates and identify their species name as Homo sapiens and also the first
scientist to recognize that whales are mammals.

Linnaeus was strongly patriotic and a prominent advocate of cameralism.

He spearheaded nationalistic projects to “re-create within his national borders
a transoceanic empire” 10 . The result of these projects was a series of
publications that included Flora Lapponica (1737) published during his stay in
the Netherlands, Flora Suecica (1745) Fauna Suecica (1746), Ölandska och
Gothländska resa (1741), Västgöta resa (1747), and Skånska resa (1751). He
undertook research trips within Sweden to identify domestic products that
could substitute for expensive imports to free Sweden from depending on
international trade. He and his students strove to cultivate foreign cash crops
such as tea and silk. Unfortunately, these projects failed.

Linnaeus’ works influenced botanical illustration, providing direction

and consistency in botanical nomenclature and classification 11 . Although
Linnaeus wrote in Genera Plantarum (1737) that he did not recommend
drawings for determining genera, he did use Georg Dionysius Ehret’s drawing
(see Figure 1) to illustrate his sexual system in the same work. In situations
when there were no herbarium specimens and botanical illustrations were the
only available information of the species, Linnaeus had used them as types for
the names of the species. In fact, a quarter of the scientific names he described
are now linked to illustrations that he cited12.

8 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carolus-Linnaeus
9 Koerner (1999), p.204
10
Koerner (1999), p.7
11 Kur (2008), pp.15-16
12 Jarvis (2008), p.83

PAGE 7
 From late 1700s onwards, many artists followed the Linnaean style.
Many florilegia began to exhibit dissections of the flower’s sexual anatomy, such
as Pierre-Joseph Redoute’s famous Les Liliacees. Notable artists who adopted
Linnaean style were Georg Ehret, Robert John Thornton and Franz Bauer.

Before 1753, most botanical illustrations were realistic and highly

detailed. However, the amount of information given in their details was lacking
largely because botanical science was without a focused means of identifying or
classifying plants”13. The Linnaean style shifted the focus from the whole plant
to the flower solely or the flower and fruit. The flowers were drawn close up,
magnified and dissected, and shown with their distinct stamens and pistils 14.
They effectively conveyed relevant scientific details to inform the botanists and
educate the audience. These works contrast sharply with the early pre-Linnaean
works which were generally straightforward visual representations of the plant
specimens. (See Figure 2)

Till this day, Linnaeus is universally regarded as the “Father of

taxonomy”. By the end of his life, Linnaeus’ system became almost adopted
worldwide. Linnaeus had acknowledged that his sexual classification system
was artificial but it was adaptable enough to accommodate future changes to
taxonomy. Although it was eventually replaced by today’s classification system,
molecular-based Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, his binomial nomenclature
system remains his most lasting legacy.

2495 words

Evonne Tay
1 April 2019

13 Kur (2008), p.14

14 Howell (2009), p.19

PAGE 8
Figure 1: The original drawing of the 24 classes of flowering plants by Georg Ehret (1708-1780).
This drawing illustrated Linnaeus' sexual system. It was first published in Linnaeus' Genera
Plantarum, first edition, 1737.

PAGE 9
Pre-Linnean style of Illustration Linnean style of Illustration

Durio zibethinus L. Durio zibethinus L.

Durian Durian
J.W. Weinmann, Phytanthoza
B. Hoola van Nooten, Fleurs, fruits et
iconographia, vol. 2: t. 468 (1739)
feuillages choisis de l’ille de Java: peints
[unsigned]
d’apres nature, t. 28 (1880) [signed by B.
Hola van Nooten]

Figure 2: Comparison between illustrations of the durian plant, in J.W. Weinmann’s

Phytanthoza iconographia, vol. 2: t. 468 published in 1739; and in B. Hoola van Nooten’s
Fleurs, fruits et feuillages choisis de l’ille de Java: peints d’apres nature, t. 28 published in
1880

Source: http://botanicalillustrations.org/species.php?id_species=365862&SID=0&mobile=0

PAGE 10
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