Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) created the modern system of classifying plants and animals by Latin names, providing an orderly framework for the study of life. Linnaeus, also a renowned authority on plants, named hundreds of species himself and was fond of quoting his famous motto: Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit—“God created, Linnaeus organized.”
Linnaeus was born in southern Sweden. His parents, who hoped the boy would become a priest, taught him Latin as a child. Instead, he studied medicine and botany at the University of Uppsala, obtaining a medical degree in 1735. Although Linnaeus practiced medicine for the rest of his life—serving at one time as doctor to the Swedish royal family—botany remained his first love. He mounted his first expedition, to Lapland, in 1731, and another in 1734 to central Sweden. He was named a professor at Uppsala in 1741, where he regaled students with stories of his adventures and inspired a wave of intrepid naturalists who traveled the world looking for new plants and animals in the eighteenth century.
The first edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae was published in 1735. Putting his childhood Latin to use, Linnaeus proposed that all plants and animals could be assigned a Latin name made up of two parts. The first part of a Linnaean name is the organism’s genus, and the second is its species. For instance, in the Linnaean system, human beings are classified as Homo sapiens—members of the genus Homo and the species sapiens. Linnaeus also put each species into broader categories, such as order and phylum. Humans are the only living species in the genus Homo, for instance, but we share the order Primates with monkeys, lemurs, apes, and other creatures that have the Primate characteristics of opposable thumbs, developed eyesight, and large brains.
Linnaeus won considerable fame for his system of classification, or taxonomy, and was made a member of the Swedish nobility in 1761 in recognition of his accomplishments. But his theories were not without controversy. He appalled some colleagues with his occasionally naughty nomenclature (he called one plant genus Clitoria) and frank discussion of sex in plants and animals. Other critics objected on a philosophical or religious basis to the very concept of lumping individual organisms into big, inflexible categories. His main critic was the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc (1707–1788), who felt that the Linnaean system was too rigid and failed to account for variations and change within species.
Linnaeus died in Uppsala at age seventy.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Linnaeus sometimes used his naming system to strike back at his enemies. For instance, Linnaeus retaliated against a German critic by naming a weed, Siegesbeckia, after him.
- During his lifetime, Linnaeus had his portrait painted more than 500 times—at a time when sitting for a portrait took hours or even days.
- Linnaeus estimated that there were only about 15,000 species on Earth; 300 years later, taxonomists have identified about 2 million and counting.
