The son of an impoverished Lutheran minister and a rector’s daughter, Carl Linnaeus was born in 1707 along the shores of a deep clear lake in southern Sweden, swaddled in a cradle decorated with blooms from his father’s garden.
As a boy, Linnaeus spent his days1 walking in the lakeside woods, carefully examining the anatomy of plants and animals he found. Nature, for him, was a reflection of the Creator. And since the Creator was perfect, nature was perfect, too, with each living creature in its place with a specific function to fulfill. “Nature,” according to Linnaeus, “never makes anything without a purpose.” The beauty of it left him “completely stunned.”
He grew up surrounded by human design and domesticated landscapes. The wild forests that had once dominated the region had long ago been razed and replaced with flat, arable meadows and orderly fields of grain. Around the rectory, Linnaeus’s father created horticultural wonders. One of his gardens presented a botanical version of a fully laden dining-room table, in the form of a raised, circular garden bed with special plants and shrubs designed to represent the various dishes of a feast and its guests. Linnaeus spent hours playing in it. Later, his fans would call him the Prince of Flowers.2
Order entranced Linnaeus, but as a natural historian he’d be called upon to describe the world’s biodiversity in all its wild and dynamic chaos. Eighteenth-century society swirled with questions about the origins and distributions of living things on the planet and, with it, the history and nature of our similarities and differences and the role migration played in creating them.
Today such questions about the origin and distribution of species and peoples would be sequestered into a field known as “biogeography,” a fascinating but mostly obscure branch of science generally considered of marginal public interest. Back then, biogeographical theory carried far-reaching consequences. The authority of the church; its hold on science, newly emerging from its shadow; the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise—and how generations of descendants would view and police migrants—all hung in the balance.
It would be up to natural historians like Linnaeus to provide answers to the most pressing questions of the day: Where did foreign peoples and strange species come from, and where did they belong?
Bigger, faster ships with better navigation capacities had allowed European explorers to travel farther and longer than ever before, catapulting them deep into Asia, Africa, and the New World, where they encountered a previously unimaginable breadth of biodiversity. Companies such as the Dutch East India Company sent battalions of explorers and colonists into remote locales of the world to plunder resources, claim new territory, and establish new trade routes. Aspiring young naturalists joined them on years-long expeditions to the South Pacific and Asia.
They returned from their voyages overflowing with breathless tales3 about the bizarre-looking foreigners and creatures they’d glimpsed overseas. “Big fierce people, dark yellow in color,” lived in the Nicobar Islands, recounted Nils Matsson Kioping, who’d visited the islands with the Dutch East India Company in the mid-seventeenth century. They wrung the necks of parrots and ate them raw, Kioping wrote. He’s seen it himself when they swarmed and boarded his ship. Each “had a tail at the back, hanging like a cat’s tail,” he wrote. The celebrated writer François-Marie Arouet, who published under the name Voltaire, described a tribe of diminutive people with red eyes, who survived to only twenty-five years of age, living in Congo. “A very small and very rare nation,” he explained. “Their minimal strength barely enables them to make their way out of the caverns where they live.” These foreign peoples participated in strange, otherworldly practices. In parts of Africa, travelers revealed, whole tribes forced their males to undergo a ritual excision of one testicle, leaving them “monorchid.”
Even when describing foreigners as recognizably human, eighteenth-century travel writers underlined4 the distinctions between European and non-European peoples and animals rather than their similarities. They described foreign peoples’ skin colors not as a range of earth-toned hues but in crudely exaggerated categories of “red,” “yellow,” “black,” and “white.” They described the breasts of women in parts of Africa not just as “large” but as so ponderous that they had to be laid upon the ground first before the woman could lie down herself, and voluminous enough to be sold as tobacco pouches.
While presented as eyewitness accounts, these tales were mostly cobbled together5 from folklore, myth, and thirdhand gossip. Some of the most prolific authors, such as Arnoldus Montanus, who produced thousand-page illustrated tomes about the world outside Europe, had never even left the continent.
Voltaire’s description of cave-dwelling peoples6 in Congo, for example, spun together various ancient myths. Herodotus had written of humanlike creatures he called “troglodytes” who lived in caves and fed on lizards. Pliny had contributed additional details about such beings, including that they were nocturnal, crawled around on their bellies like newborn puppies when exposed to sunlight, and made a “gnashing Noise” rather than speech. Voltaire cohered this mishmash into an actual people, attributing them to a location specific enough to seem credible—central Africa—and yet distant enough that few readers would ever be able to verify his claims for themselves.
Kioping’s description of his encounter7 with the yellow tailed men might have similarly been based on myths. A three-foot-tall “hobbit” hominid, Homo floresiensis is now known to have inhabited islands around Nicobar as recently as thirteen thousand years ago, when humans lived there as well. It’s possible that Kioping heard of such beings when he visited the region. Through generations of storytelling such a creature could have morphed into the tailed man he described, just as the Greek saint Nicholas had morphed into a North Pole–dwelling master of flying reindeer. He then retold the myth in the form of a dramatic personal encounter as a literary flourish.
Why were Europeans so struck by the differences they saw in their fellow peoples, rather than by the equally striking similarities they shared? It wasn’t as if Europeans were some monolithically homogenous group of peoples, in contrast to peoples from other regions. Europeans themselves encompassed a wide range of hair types, skin tones, body shapes, and more. As a group, they were diverse, and they shared as many commonalities with peoples in other places as they did with one another. After all, peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas are and were kin.
One theory attributes Europeans’ exaggerated perception of the strangeness of foreigners to the changing nature of travel at the time. Before the era of long-distance sea voyages, traders’ and travelers’ perceptions of differences between groups of people scattered across the landscape had remained indistinct. Europe’s encounters with other groups of people—and theirs with Europe—had been the result of movements that were slow and plodding. Traveling by land, traders and explorers passed through contiguous, adjacent areas that shared overlapping geographical features and climates, as well as the usual conflict-ridden and romance-laden relations of human neighbors everywhere, whether enemies or allies. Bonded by shared climates and genetic relationships, whatever biological distinctions had arisen in one group gently graded into those that had emerged in the next. Those passing by would have seen a range of skin colors, body types, and facial characteristics grading subtly and perhaps imperceptibly, with few if any dramatic physical distinctions between groups.
Accordingly, in earlier eras, certain aspects of foreign people8 that appeared so strikingly distinct to eighteenth-century explorers—variations in skin color, for example—had been considered an irrelevant detail, like the pattern of spots on a dog. In the metropolises of Lower Nubia, Upper Nubia, and ancient Egypt, for example, people’s skin tones ranged from fair to dark, in accordance with the fifteen degrees of latitude that the four-thousand-plus-mile Nile River valley they lived along crossed. But while contemporary artworks depicted their skin color diversity, skin color variation had nothing to do with the social hierarchy they’d maintained for thousands of years. In pre-Enlightenment Europe, too, artists and geographers tended to depict overseas peoples as physically similar to Europeans. A 1595 painting of the so-called Hottentots, a vaguely defined group of Africans, depicted them as two “classically Greek-looking men,” as the biologist and historian Anne Fausto-Sterling points out. Skin color back then was more like hair color is today, a noticeable but socially meaningless detail.
The nature of eighteenth-century European exploration led to a distinctly different experience of human diversity.9 Instead of traveling through contiguous, connected regions on land, travelers journeyed thousands of miles over uninhabited seas. This had the effect of depositing them abruptly in entirely new regions with distinctly different climates and geographies. That may be why the continuity of human diversity may have appeared so strikingly discontinuous. It was as if, rather than wading from shallow warm waters into cooler deeper ones, they’d jumped directly into the depths.
Depictions of and stories about these strange foreign others10—featured in illustrated volumes, paintings, tapestries, and other artifacts—dazzled, delighted, and confounded European sensibilities. Living specimens occasionally made their way into Europe in traveling exhibits, where even Europeans wary of arduous overseas travel could catch a glimpse of the oddities of the natural world beyond their shores. Wealthy elites created menageries in which they assembled live antelopes, lions, monkeys, flamingoes, and even more fantastical beasts. One exhibitor in Hamburg boasted of a seven-headed hydra in his collection, which natural historians traveled across the continent to view. It was a fake—an amalgam of body parts from weasels, glued together and covered in snakeskin—but the credulous public interest in the strange biology of foreigners was real. Exhibitors displayed women touted as mermaids, Hottentots, and troglodytes, who were often small African and South American children with albinism.
The point was not to accurately recount the details of foreign peoples and places. It was to express Europeans’ ambient sense of foreignness. Their traveling exhibits of Hottentots and troglodytes and menageries full of seven-headed hydras were designed to shock—but they were also, in a way, an expression of shock itself. Whoever they were, whatever they looked like, the foreigners beyond Europe’s borders were different: a breed apart.
This preoccupation with distinctions between peoples did not derive from any explicit consideration of migration. But to recognize the role of migration in our past, one had to accept the notion of our biological commonality. It is our shared humanity that makes our migratory past a logical necessity. How else could we have gotten around the world? The success of our past migrations, in turn, suggested the likelihood of similarly successful future ones. But with publishers and exhibitors lining their pockets with the most salacious and sensational depictions of foreign peoples, European perceptions of the oddity of foreigners steadily grew.
Debate swirled among intellectuals and elites11 gathered in newly formed scientific societies across the continent. Who had created specimens such as the yellow tailed men? The divine Creator, as the church said, or some other, unknown creative force in nature? Could such beings actually be related to Europeans, who commonly descended from Adam and Eve as the Bible indicated? And if so, how did they get to their far-flung locales where European explorers had encountered them? Most eighteenth-century explorers—despite having made the journey across oceans and continents themselves—could not imagine that anyone else might have done the same.
As the perceived gulf between peoples on different continents widened, the less credible the notion of a shared origin—and with it the promise of migration in our past and future—became.
Linnaeus had little direct knowledge12 of the extent of the world’s biodiversity. He undertook his sole voyage of exploration while a medical student at Uppsala University. His itinerary was conservative: he would travel no farther than the northern province of Lapland, in his own Sweden. Nevertheless, he would still enjoy ample opportunities to learn about and understand the nature of cultural and biological diversity. The untamed northern tundra was poorly understood at the time, populated by reindeer-herding nomads whom Linnaeus called Laplanders, now known as the Sami. The Uppsala Science Society speculated that the Sami might be a lost tribe of Israel, or perhaps some mysteriously transplanted denizens of the New World. Some scholars hypothesized that they might be pygmies or the Central Asian nomads known as Scythians.
Linnaeus hired some guides and set off on foot for a six-month journey through Lapland. He took the safest route possible, clinging to the coast for as long as he could, scribbling notes on the flora and fauna and collecting unusual plants and insects. He was miserable. “How I wish that I had never undertaken my journey!” he wrote in his journal at one point. He “longed for a companion” and felt defeated by “this desolate wilderness.” And he failed to learn much about the Sami. The “few natives I came upon spoke with a foreign accent,” he complained.
Linnaeus wasn’t much of an adventurer. He could not countenance people speaking languages other than Swedish. Later, when he’d be forced to visit Finland—he hadn’t wanted to subject himself to the discomforts of travel—he privately complained that the people there didn’t speak Swedish. “They speak nothing but Finnish,” he noted with disdain. He also considered the Finns “quarrelsome” people and felt repelled by what he called a “disgusting stench of a sour white fish.” One of his biographers, Lisbet Koerner, called him a “rude provincial—sentimental, superstitious, and devoid of general culture.”
The trip was a failure. When he returned to Uppsala with great relief, he took pains to conceal its shortcomings. He submitted materials to his funders that exaggerated the hardships he’d encountered, even including details about one outing that required acts of physical prowess and daring so outlandish that modern biographers are certain that he made it up. He cobbled together an outfit including a Sami woman’s cap and a drum, which he passed off as an authentic Sami costume and donned for special occasions. He even had his portrait painted while wearing it. He may not have learned much about the Sami, but nobody else knew much about them, either. For years he would present himself as such an experienced interlocutor of the Sami people that he’d practically become a Sami himself.
His benefactors were impressed.13 “I don’t believe,” one wrote, “there was a man so learn’d in all parts of natural history as he; and that not superficial, but to the bottom.”
In any discipline that attempts to create order from a confusion of data, there are what Charles Darwin would later call “lumpers” and “splitters.” The splitters focus on differences between the data points, cleaving them into as many categories as necessary to distinguish each from the other based on their distinctions, however minute. Lumpers attempt to discern underlying similarities within the disparate data points, grouping as many together based on unifying commonalities.
Linnaeus, who would sniff out any hint of a distinction to draw yet another biological border, was a splitter.
Linnaeus started writing his groundbreaking taxonomy14—a system of naming, describing, and classifying the world’s biodiversity—while working as a personal physician and curator for a botanical garden estate owned by a director of the Dutch East India Company. He created a simple categorization system, one that anyone could use. He gave each species two Latin names: the first denoting its general category, and the second its specific character.
At first, Linnaeus left the thorny question of the origins and classification of foreign peoples unresolved. For many natural historians, the different shades of foreigners’ skin—in particular the darker skin tones of African peoples—signaled some deeper physiological distinctions, the way the differently colored exterior of an apple distinguished it from, say, a pear. But Linnaeus struggled with how to fit that possibility into his taxonomy. If all peoples shared a common origin as the Bible said, then he’d have to admit that Europeans shared kinship with the foreigners they considered primitive and savage and possibly biologically alien. That was an unappealing option. At the same time, pointing to a separate lineage would suggest that the story of Adam and Eve was wrong, which was a sacrilege. Linnaeus sidestepped the issue. When it came to describing humans,15 Linnaeus wrote “Nosce te ipsum” by way of explanation: “know yourself.” Basically, figure it out on your own.
Human bodies and relationships shaped his early taxonomies nevertheless. Recognizing the importance of sexual reproduction, he classified plants based on the anatomy of their sexual organs, categorizing male plants by their stamens and female plants by their pistils. Possibly because he could think of no other way of writing about it, he used the metaphors and language used to describe human sexual relations in his descriptions.
He described botanical marriages,16 husbands, wives, and harlots. He likened botanical sexual organs to those of humans. The anthers, pollen, and filament in stamens—the male sexual organ in plants—equated to the testes, semen, and vas deferens in human men; the style and tube of the pistil, pericarp, and seeds of plants’ female sexual organs to the vulva, vagina, fallopian tubes, ovaries, and eggs in human females.
“Every animal feels the sexual urge,”17 he wrote. “Yes, love comes even to the plants. Males and females, even the hermaphrodites, hold their nuptials … The actual petals of a flower … serving only as a bridal bed which the great Creator has so gloriously prepared, adorned with such precious bedcurtains and perfumed with so many sweet scents in order that the bridegroom and bride may therein celebrate their nuptials with the greater solemnity.”
This steered Linnaeus into dangerous territory, for only a few plants conformed to the sexual practices that eighteenth-century Europeans considered respectable. Some female plants mated with twenty different male plants, and male plants mated with female plants other than their regular companions. Some plants reproduced with their own offspring. By inviting his readers to consider the reproductive act between a male and female plant as akin to a wedding night on an adorned bridal bed, Linnaeus implicitly invited them to consider these other much more provocative practices—incest, polygamy, adultery—in human terms as well.
The first edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae came out in 1735. Critics decried it18 as abhorrent, lewd, and vulgar. “Loathsome harlotry,” the Prussian botanist Johann Siegesbeck roared. In one particularly cutting analysis that made the rounds, a critic used Linnaeus’s sexual taxonomy to characterize Linnaeus himself as a plant-woman. “I was the laughing stock of everybody,” Linnaeus complained. The opprobrium nearly drove him to a nervous breakdown.
Linnaeus’s rival,19 the French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, grew up on an estate in the village of Buffon, in the Dijon region of eastern France. The estate had been bought with a fortune his civil servant parents had inherited from his great-uncle. At university, he studied mathematics and medicine and traveled through Europe with his friend the Duke of Kingston. When he returned, he bought the village of Buffon, adding the suffix “de Buffon” to his name, and moved to Paris, where he’d been appointed as curator for the king’s medical gardens.
If Linnaeus was a splitter, Buffon was a lumper. His ideas ravaged Linnaean taxonomy.
Unlike Linnaeus, who pictured nature as unchanging and rigidly ordered, Buffon saw it as mutable and dynamic.20 All of nature consisted of an unbroken continuum, separated only by “imperceptible nuances” and “unknown gradations,” Buffon wrote. His vision of nature resurrected ancient ideas, such as those of the sixth century–B.C.E. Greek philosopher Heraclitus. The solidity of rock, the contours of waterways, and the habits of living creatures did not express some fundamentally unchanging material nature. They were just momentary expressions of processes in flux, with no fixed substance. Permanence was an illusion. What was real was change.
This led Buffon to some radical notions about human history and biology. All humans, regardless of where they lived or the color of their skin, Buffon wrote, “derive from the same stock and are of the same family.”
If Europeans and Africans were biologically distinct like, say, horses and donkeys, the child of one European and one African parent would be sterile, like a mule. But such children weren’t. “If the Mulatto were a real mule,” he wrote, “there would indeed be two truly distinct species … and we would be right to think that the white and the nègre in no way had a common origin. But this presumption itself is refuted by reality.”
What’s more, Buffon knew of the phenomenon we now call albinism and that it occurred in dark-skinned Africans. Pliny the Elder, Ptolemy, and the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela had written about African people with albinism. The explorer Hernán Cortés had claimed to have encountered people with the condition in Montezuma’s palace in 1519. This condition—in which dark-skinned parents produce pale-skinned progeny—was of great interest to eighteenth-century observers. Some commentators theorized that albinism was a kind of poxlike skin disease. Others argued that the African albino proved that the feature of pale skin had preceded that of dark skin. The albino African was like a wild offshoot of a cultivated garden type, they argued, reverting back to ancestral type.
For Buffon, albinism among Africans21 proved that skin color was a superficial, mutable trait overlaid atop Europeans’ and Africans’ common humanity. Buffon’s friend Voltaire had written that “the Negro race is a species of men different to ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds.” But that couldn’t be, Buffon pointed out. African parents, despite their dark skin, could give birth to pale-skinned babies. Spaniels don’t give birth to greyhound puppies.
The observable differences between different peoples derived not from any intrinsic biological distinction, Buffon said, but from variable processes of change and adaptation.
Positing foreigners as human allowed Buffon to adhere to the biblical story tracing all of humanity back to the Garden of Eden. But it did require him to explain how foreigners had disseminated themselves across the globe and, if they’d descended from Adam and Eve like the Europeans, how they’d acquired their dark skin and strange features.
He imagined a history of migration.
Buffon famously created labyrinths and mazes at the king’s gardens. He envisioned a human past marked by similarly circuitous routes. There was no evidence of long-distance migrations at the time, but Russian expeditions had suggested a possible land bridge across the Bering Strait. Such a land bridge might have allowed people without the benefit of oceangoing ships to travel from the Old World into the New on foot, Buffon figured. Perhaps, he speculated, sometime in our deep past22 our ancestors had left the Garden of Eden on a series of long-distance migrations, depositing them in all the far-flung and diverse landscapes that European explorers had recently discovered.
Those migrations and dispersals—entirely theoretical though they were at the time—explained the distribution of humans in different parts of the world, as well as their various visual aspects that had so captivated and preoccupied eighteenth-century audiences. After migrating, Buffon speculated, peoples on different continents and regions adapted to a variety of unique environmental conditions, morphing their bodies into a range of shapes and colors.
The idea that weather patterns23 and climatic zones influenced health and the shape of the body dates back to Aristotle and Hippocrates. As scientists would later show, migration and the changes it forced does explain much of the observed variations that Europeans chattered about in their salons and scientific societies. The landscapes people migrated into left marks on our bodies. We evolved genes to help us digest the local foods, tolerate the local weather, and survive the local pathogens. To withstand the extreme cold of the Arctic, people had evolved higher metabolic rates, larger body mass, shorter limbs, and the stockier bodies that reduce heat loss. We evolved different skin tones. In the higher latitudes where vitamin D–bestowing sunlight is limited, we evolved paler skin that absorbed more UV light, and the ability to digest lactose, so we could ingest the vitamin D in milk. Those who migrated through the equatorial parts of the planet evolved the ability to retain the sodium that their bodies lost through sweat, and the long arms and legs that promoted heat loss and kept them cool. Many of the biological distinctions that eighteenth-century explorers noted, including variable skin colors and body types, did indeed stem, at least in part, from how bodies had adapted to different landscapes.
But Buffon is not remembered today for his prescience. Both he and Linnaeus drew on the conventional wisdom, passed down through philosophers and theologians since medieval times, that all matter and life on earth organized itself hierarchically, in what the ancients called the Great Chain of Being. Each kind or class of living thing or physical matter was its own link in the chain, its position representing its rank in terms of positive attributes. At the bottom of the chain lay rocks. Above emeralds and sapphires lay rubies and above them diamonds. A bit farther up, plants. Birds of prey occupied a higher rung than birds that ate worms such as robins, which occupied a higher rung than those lowly birds that ate seeds, such as sparrows. Above animals lay people. Peasants occupied the lowest rungs, then clergy, noblemen, and kings. Above them, on the uppermost rungs, lay angels and God himself.
And so for Buffon, differences between foreigners and Europeans that emerged via migration were not morally neutral.
As people and species migrated from the Garden of Eden, Buffon theorized, new diets and climates “degenerated” them. Because the Garden of Eden had been located somewhere near Europe, Europeans retained much of their original state of perfection. He couldn’t say as much for the Africans, Asians, and Americans, whose migrations into too-hot and too-cold climates had turned them into the misshapen, morally questionable creatures described by eighteenth-century voyagers.
The degenerative effects of migration24 explained the “savages” of the Americas, Buffon argued. They’d rotted in North America’s wet and cold climate. “The Savage is weak and small in the organs of generation,” he wrote. “He has neither beard nor attraction for the female … He is also less sensitive and more fearful … He will rest stupidly in repose on his haunches or sleep for the entire day … The most precious flames of the fire of Nature has been refused to them.” He considered the colonists who’d settled in the Americas similarly compromised. Consider the lack of poets and geniuses among them, he pointed out. Even North American animals had become puny and diminished.
(The eleventh-century Islamic philosopher Avicenna had postulated a similar sequence of events, but in his scheme, it was the people in Europe who were mentally inferior to those in his own Central Asia. Deprived of sunlight, Europeans “lack keenness of understanding and clarity of intelligence,” he’d held, while sun-drenched Nubians and Ethiopians “lack self-control and steadiness of mind.” Both groups were best suited to enslavement, he figured.)
Buffon detailed his ideas in what would become a massive thirty-six-volume encyclopedia, Histoire naturelle, the first three volumes of which appeared in 1749.
Americans such as Thomas Jefferson disputed Buffon’s unflattering portrayal of his countrymen and women as degenerates. Jefferson devoted a long chapter in his sole book, Notes on the State of Virginia, to debunking it. (His main counterevidence: the strapping bodies of moose, found only in North America.) But elsewhere, Histoire naturelle was a hit, read by every educated person on the continent.
Top scientific societies25 of Paris, Berlin, London, and elsewhere extended invitations for membership, and royals showered Buffon with gifts. The king made him comte de Buffon and commissioned a sculptor to create a bust of his likeness.
Linnaeus was not impressed.26
“Wordy descriptions,” he noted acidly. “Few observations … without any method,” he went on. “Criticizes everyone, but forgets to criticize himself, although he himself has erred the most. Hater of all methods.”
Over the years, Linnaeus had published additional versions of Systema Naturae, each one more elaborate than the last. Lewd or not, the system Linnaeus devised made the naming of living things uniform and universal.27 Before him, naturalists grouped aquatic mammals with fish, categorized four-footed animals according to their size, associated bats with birds of prey, and classified birds according to where they made their nests. They compared the specimens they found to illustrations in expensive, hand-colored and copper-engraved volumes to figure out if anyone had encountered them before, and if so, what they’d called them. But with Linnaeus’s taxonomy, they didn’t need that anymore. “Take a bird or a lizard or a flower28 from Patagonia or the South Seas, perhaps one that had had a local name for centuries, rechristen it with a Latin binomial, and presto!” writes the essayist Anne Fadiman. It became a tiny European colony. Linnaean taxonomy was a “form of mental colonising and empire-building,” a potent tool in Europe’s campaigns of conquest, writes the historian Richard Holmes. Any living creature anywhere could be fit into its order.
Luminaries and royal patrons29 from across the continent called on the celebrated naturalist, bearing gifts of exotic animals to add to his menagerie, which included cockatoos, peacocks, a cassowary, four kinds of parrots, an orangutan, monkeys, an agouti, and a raccoon. Students from all over Europe flocked to Uppsala University to hear Linnaeus hold forth on botany, natural history, diet, and disease. The luckiest among them might be subjects for one of his impromptu skull examinations, through which he determined the nature of their talents. Rather than quietly creep off into the forest to collect samples, as many field biologists might, Linnaeus, confident in his own celebrity, set off with his students in parades waving banners, playing horns, and beating drums, yelling “Vivat Linnaeus!”
Linnaeus had little truck for Buffon’s reliance on migration as an explanation for the distribution of peoples and species. By elevating migratory transformation, Buffon’s theories questioned the permanence of nature and challenged the perfection of the Creator.
Linnaeus discounted even the most obvious30 migrations in nature. To be fair, at the time, not much was known about wild migrations. Nobody back then could have easily tracked birds’ movements over mountains and oceans, for example. Mariners had often reported seeing birds flapping across seas miles from shore, suggesting some secret wintertime passage. And some birds reappeared in the spring singing birdsong from Africa—the auditory equivalent of airline tags fluttering from their baggage. Some even turned up with bodies damaged by African-style spears, including one stork that arrived in Europe with an entire spear pierced through its body. (The Germans called her der Pfeilstorch, or “arrow stork.”)
But possibilities other than migration could explain such phenomena. The theory that Linnaeus and many of his contemporaries subscribed to held that the reason birds disappeared in the fall was because they hid in caves, trees, and underwater for the winter. Aristotle had proposed that swallows hibernated at the bottom of lakes. This idea had been “treated as a matter of fact for hundreds of years,” the historian Richard Armstrong explains. Linnaeus did not question it.
In the sixteenth century,31 the Swedish archbishop Olaus Magnus had illustrated his natural history tome, History and Nature of the Northern Peoples, with a depiction of a fisherman pulling a net full of sodden swallows out of the water, as if they’d been awakened from their submarine stupor. A seventeenth-century French ornithologist even went to the trouble of attempting to observe birds’ winter hibernation, by watching over captured birds in his aviary all season to see if they fell into a seasonal slumber.
Regardless of the implausibility of winter hibernation, the alternative idea that birds annually traveled thousands of miles32 across continents and oceans clashed with the Christian paradigm of an unchanging, orderly world. Heraclitan ideas had been condemned as pagan and backward by the church: the third-century Christian theologian Hippolytus called Heraclitus’s notions “blasphemous folly.” If creatures migrated great distances between continents, where had the Creator “fixed” them and into which place? What could possibly be the purpose of departures for distant foreign climes when the surrounding natural world was so stable and harmonious? In the Bible, after all, migratory creatures expressed God’s divine punishment, not his perfection. Take migratory insects, for example, which are the most cited insects in the Bible. God sends them out as plagues to punish the early Egyptians, as a curse for disobedience, and as harbingers of apocalypse.
For Linnaeus, there’d been only a single dispersal33 in the past. He imagined the Garden of Eden as a tropical, mountainous island in a primordial sea, where cold-weather creatures lived atop the summits while warm-weather ones confined themselves to the plains. As the sea receded, the original animals and plants slowly dispersed from Eden into their current locations in the cold and warm parts of the earth. The dispersal happened once at the beginning of time. Since then, no species ever arose nor was extinguished. “It is impossible,” Linnaeus wrote, “that anything which has ever been established by the all-wise Creator can ever disappear.” Nor did they ever change. That was a logical corollary to the Creator’s perfection and all-knowing omnipotence.
He dismissed Buffon’s work, and his ideas about migration, change, and climatic adaptations, out of hand. “As he is rather eloquent34 that seems to count for something,” Linnaeus grumbled, but Buffon “isn’t particularly learned.”
Buffon’s method of cataloging nature with a lush descriptive method that emphasized dynamism and fluidity was shallow and pretentious. Even worse, Linnaeus noted, Buffon had written his encyclopedia “in French,” which Linnaeus frowned on and could not read. For Linnaeus, everything about Buffon’s theory and the way he described it stank of swanky Parisian elitism.
He named a plant after the comte,35 a foul-smelling weed he dubbed “Buffonia.”
With his tenth and most authoritative edition36 of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus crushed Buffon and his ideas for good. In it, he named and classified over four thousand animals and nearly eight thousand plants. He also laid out a definitive human taxonomy, settling the question of the differences between foreigners and Europeans once and for all.
While foreigners were popularly understood to be, in some inchoate way, biologically distinct from Europeans, evidence that any observed differences extended beyond the most superficial was spotty at best. For nearly a century, European microscopists and anatomists had searched for systematic biological explanations for the observed physical distinctions between Europeans and other peoples. Despite decades of research, the best evidence dated back to 1665, when the microscopist Marcello Malpighi had claimed to discover, between Africans’ darkened outer layer of skin and the inner white one, a third layer of skin, which Malpighi called the “reticulum mucosum” or “Malpighian layer.” According to Malpighi, this novel physiological feature, found exclusively in African bodies, consisted of a thick, fatty black liquid of unknown provenance.
The Malpighian layer was taken up as the smoking gun that proved that Africans were, in fact, biologically distinct from Europeans. “The mucous membrane, or network, which Nature has spread between the muscles and the skin, is white in us and black or copper-colored in them,” Voltaire wrote. But upon further investigation, the Malpighian layer was revealed as phantasmal. It was impossible to extract the thick, fatty black liquid itself, as the French anatomist Alexis Littré discovered in 1702, when he attempted to isolate the layer’s gelatinous substance by soaking African skin in various liquids. (He had also searched for the source of blackness in the sexual organs of an African man, which he dissected.)
In 1739 a French scientific society called the Académie royale des sciences de Bordeaux had laid down a challenge for the scientific community: “What is the physical cause of the nègres’ color, or the quality of their hair, and of the degeneration of the one and of the other?” the Académie demanded, offering a prize to whichever natural historian could come up with the best answer to the question.
The Dutch anatomist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s inquiries led him to believe37 that the color of African skin derived from darkened scales. Or perhaps, as the physician Pierre Barrère had surmised through his dissection of African slaves, it radiated from darkened bile inside the body, which stained both its tissues and the skin. None of it amounted to anything definitive. One Parisian anatomist examined the skin of an African man, using a chemical compound to blister and remove it. He found a dark-colored outer layer, unsurprisingly, over a white inner layer. What did it mean about the extent and origins of the most noted physical difference between Europeans and foreign peoples from Africa? Not much. Even Europeans came in a variety of skin tones. He surmised that the sun had seared their skins.
The Académie question remained unanswered, but in the end that wouldn’t matter to Linnaeus. A different biological feature, albeit equally elusive, would prove far more influential in his assessment of which peoples belonged where.
Sexual anatomy fascinated Linnaeus.38 Variations in reproductive organs formed the basis of his taxonomic system. But not only that. He’d elevated the breast as the common feature distinctive to the category of creatures he named after the Latin mamma for “breast” as “mammals,” rather than their other shared features, such as their distinctive hair, jawbones, or additional characteristics. He’d penned a special book for his son that included clinical details on adultery, incest, masturbation, and such varied topics as how women can make intercourse unpleasant for their male partners. When animals in his menagerie died, he routinely dissected their genitals, as one of his biographers notes.
Any hint of a difference in reproductive organs in peoples would figure prominently in his taxonomic scheme. And according to contemporary reports, foreign bodies—in particular those of women from parts of Africa—did indeed have unique reproductive organs, including a body part that no European possessed.
It was known as the “Hottentot apron,”39 the “sinus pudoris,” or the “genital flap.” It was first reported by the French explorer François Le Vaillant. Translators deleted Le Vaillant’s description of the feature in the English translation of his writings, but his illustration, supposedly based on his own observations, was widely circulated. It depicted a naked woman with two long, skinny tails, reaching about to her knees, hanging from her labia minora.
At first, European travelers speculated40 that the sinus pudoris was an artifact of genital mutilation. Le Vaillant claimed it was a form a fashion; the Dutch East India Company seaman Nicolaus de Graaf described it as a bodily “ornament.” But as the eighteenth century progressed, and speculation about biologically distinct foreigners intensified, European naturalists increasingly understood the sinus pudoris as an authentic body part. Buffon described it as an “outgrowth of wide and stiff skin that grows over the pubic bone.” The French zoologist Georges Cuvier considered it to be evidence of the nonhumanness of Africans. The Hottentots’ genitals were similar to those of “female Mandrilles, Baboons, etc., … which take at certain times of their life a really monstrous increase,” he wrote.
The sinus pudoris, along with other anatomical differences between Europeans and foreigners, formed the borderlines defining Linnaeus’s human taxonomy.
Certain humans, he said, were a separate species altogether.41 Homo troglodytes, he wrote, is “certainly not of the same species as man, nor of common descent or blood with us.” Homo caudatus, he wrote, is an “inhabitant of the Antarctic globe” that “can strike fire, and also eat flesh, although it devours it raw.” Homo caudatus included the tailed men of Borneo and Nicobar, whom he’d read about in Kioping. The Sami, peoples he’d spent months with, he categorized as a nonhuman species, too: Homo monstrosus, a group that included dwarfs and Patagonian giants. (Buffon categorized the Sami, under his theory of degeneration, as “dwarfish degenerates.”)
The human species, too, fell into distinct biological categories—subspecies even—each homogenous and specific to its own place in the landscape and in the moral order.
Homo sapiens europaeus, the peoples of Europe, were “white, serious, strong,” with flowing blond hair and blue eyes. They were “active, very smart, inventive,” Linnaeus wrote in his taxonomy. “Covered by tight clothing. Ruled by laws.”
The people who lived in Asia were a separate subspecies called Homo sapiens asiaticus. “Yellow, melancholy, greedy,” he wrote. “Hair black. Eyes dark. Severe, haughty, desirous. Covered by loose garments. Ruled by opinion.”
The peoples of the Americas were a subspecies called Homo sapiens americanus. “Red, ill-tempered, subjugated,” Linnaeus wrote in his description. “Hair black, straight, thick. Nostrils wide; face harsh, beard scanty. Obstinate, contented, free. Paints himself with red lines. Ruled by custom.”
And finally the most distinct subspecies of all was Homo sapiens afer, the peoples of Africa. Linnaeus speculated, privately,42 that this subspecies might not be fully human but descended from a cross between a human and troglodyte. “Black, impassive, lazy,” his taxonomy read. “Hair kinked. Skin silky. Nose flat. Lips thick. Women with genital flap; breasts large. Crafty, slow, foolish. Anoints himself with grease. Ruled by caprice.”
With this human taxonomy, Linnaeus proclaimed natural history’s independence43 from church teachings, disentangling science from religion and allying it with the state, a realignment that would make possible the rise of modern scientific authority. While possibly sacrilegious, his idea that humans fell into biologically distinct groups fixed to separate continents, each in its place—blacks in Africa, reds in America, yellows in Asia, and whites in Europe—facilitated Europe’s political and economic interests. If foreigners were kin to Europeans, as Buffon had argued, then an argument could be made that they deserved the same rights, privileges, and moral consideration as anyone else, an argument that would pose a serious impediment to colonial designs on foreign lands and bodies. From a colonial perspective, it was more convenient to cast foreigners as so strange as to be unrelated or perhaps not even human at all. When the Dutch first settled southern Africa, for example, they’d considered the local peoples whose lands they invaded not as humans but as animals. They even claimed to shoot and eat them on occasion. Now such activities had the imprimatur of the world’s most famous natural historian.
The publication of his tenth edition of Systema Naturae, including his definitive human taxonomy, ushered in Linnaeus’s “rapid historical triumph” over Buffon,44 the science historian Phillip R. Sloan writes. Influential eighteenth-century writers rejected Buffon’s theory of degeneration, adopting instead Linnaeus’s concept of foreigners as different subspecies of humans, color-coded by continent.
In 1774 Louis XV ordered45 Linnaeus’s classification system to be officially adopted. Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed he knew “no greater man on earth”; Goethe, that only Shakespeare and Spinoza had been more influential on his thinking. In 1776 the Prince of Flowers was ennobled as Carl von Linné.
In Linnaean taxonomy, nature existed in discrete units, defined by biological borders. Each creature and people survived in its own place, separate and isolated from the others. The connective tissue that migrants created between peoples and places played little biological role of note. It barely existed.
As Linnaeus ascended to his place in history as the Father of Modern Taxonomy, migrants and migration as a force in nature and history receded into the background.
The most explosive claim in Linnaean taxonomy,46 that people who lived on different continents were biologically foreign to one another, a claim that would fuel centuries of xenophobia and generations of racial violence, rested on a single body part, the sinus pudoris. But very few—quite possibly none—of those who commented on the sinus pudoris had actually ever seen it.
Linnaeus hadn’t. He had tried to catch a glimpse of one on his visit to Lapland. When an elderly Sami woman in Lapland sat casually in front of him wearing a short dress, he took the opportunity to jot down a “detailed description of her pudendum” or vulva, one of his biographers noted. (This particular stretch of Linnaean insight has yet to be translated from the Latin.) He’d written to the Swedish East India Company, asking them to acquire a “troglodyte” for him so he could personally examine it. (He’d similarly pleaded with the Swedish Academy of Sciences to sell him—alive or preserved—a Danish mermaid that they claimed to have on exhibit in Jutland. “This is a phenomenon which does not occur more than once every 100 or 1,000 years,” he explained.)
A traveling exhibit of a troglodyte arrived in London right around the time he wrote his human taxonomy. He had “never been so delighted,” the science historian Gunnar Broberg writes. Linnaeus heard that the creature—in fact, a ten-year-old girl from Jamaica with albinism—was “wholly white, but with negroid features,” and in addition had “pale yellow eyes turned to a curious position as if squinting, and unable to tolerate daylight, although seeing better in the dark.”
First he tried to buy the girl47 and bring her to Uppsala. When that failed, he dispatched one of his students to London with instructions to closely examine her genitals. But despite Linnaeus’s promise of a membership in the prestigious Society of Science at Uppsala if he succeeded, the student came back empty-handed. The young girl’s keeper refused to cooperate with his request, regardless of the stature of the famed naturalist who’d sent him.
European scientists continued to be foiled48 for decades. In 1810 a Dutch businessman brought a woman named Saartjie Baartman, who’d worked as a servant for Dutch farmers near Cape Town in South Africa, to Europe to put on exhibit. He called her the Hottentot Venus. Her tour through the capitals of Europe attracted widespread interest. During the exhibit, Baartman would be “produced like a wild beast, and ordered to move backwards and forward and come out and go into her cage, more like a bear on a chain than a human being,” as antislavery activists put it at the time. Viewers could, for an extra fee, poke and prod her behind.
Europe’s most famous scientists flocked to view49 the exhibit in hopes of confirming the fact of her sinus pudoris. Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, visited the exhibit equipped with his sextant, which he used to measure her body from every direction so he could figure out her precise dimensions. But while she was on display in the traveling exhibit, a fig leaf generally covered the organ in question.
Cuvier arranged for a commission50 of zoologists and physiologists to examine Baartman during a three-day scientific survey in Paris. During her examination, Baartman clutched a handkerchief over herself, only briefly and with “great sorrow,” as the science historian Londa Schiebinger puts it, allowing it to drop. The gathered scientists didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but they figured she hadn’t given them enough time to get a good look.
Baartman died in 1815, at the age of twenty-six. Cuvier seized on the opportunity to dissect her body and capture the holy grail of eighteenth-century anatomy once and for all.
He didn’t find anything like51 what Le Vaillant and Linnaeus had described. There was no long skinny tail attached to her genitals. All he found were pretty run-of-the-mill labia. They looked to Cuvier like “two wrinkled fleshy petals.” The most he could say about them was that they seemed “greatly enlarged.”
Still, absence of evidence52 was not taken for evidence of absence. Instead, Cuvier presented his result with all the fanfare of a most significant and telling finding. He devoted nine pages of his sixteen-page memoir about the dissection to a detailed description of Baartman’s genitals, along with her breasts, buttocks, and pelvis, paying homage to Linnaeus’s presumption of her divergent sexual anatomy. He removed Baartman’s genitals from her body and preserved them in a jar at the anthropology museum Musée de l’homme in Paris.
For decades, museums and exhibitors displayed Baartman’s body as proof of Linnaeus’s characterization of non-Europeans as biologically alien. Plaster casts of her body, enlarged illustrations, and even a stuffed display of her actual skin appeared in museums and exhibits across the continent, including at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, where tens of millions marveled at her ordinary human body, as if it were somehow distinct from their own.
The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote about his visit to the Musée de l’homme in 1987. He found the jar of preserved genitalia Cuvier had prepared sitting on a shelf in the basement.
Linnaean taxonomy formed the basis53 for the modern study of nature. Later taxonomists updated his classifications but maintained its basic structure. Linnaeus’s system of reflecting the geographic location of a species in its name “became unreliable,” his biographer Lisbet Koerner writes, as scientists discovered that most were more “divergent and geographically dispersed” than Linnaeus had presumed. They moved around. But his categorization of insects into flies, bees and wasps, butterflies, lacewings, bugs and aphids, and beetles, held up for years even as scientists discovered hundreds of thousands of new insect species. His human taxonomy proved equally influential, although less heralded. Linnaeus was not bold enough to make the heretical argument that the various human subspecies could not possibly have commonly descended from Adam and Eve. Crossing the church risked royal censorship. The eighteenth-century naturalist Pierre-Louis Moreau54 of Maupertuis, for example, who had similarly described Africans as a separate species from Europeans, responded to the question as to whether such strange foreigners could descend from the same mother with “Il ne nous est pas permis d’en douter”: “We are not allowed to doubt it.”
Linnaeus did not dare doubt it either, but at the same time, he didn’t bother reconciling his depiction of foreign human subspecies with the Bible. He issued his human classification system and let others interpret it.
While Linnaeus refused to spell out its implications, bolder scientists would. Migration had played no role in disseminating peoples around the planet, they said. There was no common ancestry between peoples. Foreigners were biologically alien, as different from native peoples as cats from dogs.
During Linnaeus’s time, these notions did not impinge on most people’s daily lives. Most people did not freely mix with people who’d been born on different continents. That would change when transatlantic shipping brought masses of people from Europe, Asia, and Africa together in the New World. People from distant places would not just glimpse each other from afar or read about each other in stories. They’d brush against each other in alleys, drink at the same bars, and work alongside each other on factory floors. They’d fall in love. They’d have babies.
Scientists predicted a biological disaster, igniting a social panic that would shape scientific inquiry, law, and politics for decades.