“‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language…nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’”
GENESIS 11:6–7
On the morning of Friday, May 12, 1732, Linnaeus left Uppsala. It was his birthday. The horse sighed under the weight and then stumbled forward, but the going was slow. Not far from his starting point Linnaeus got off his mount and pulled out his writing pad. He had seen a flower on the ground, something yellowish and intriguing. A little farther on, he stopped again and got down. He would make thousands more such stops. He was, like most biologists, a difficult travel companion.* A trip that should have taken a day would take three. Another flower and then another and then a bird and then a beetle called his attention. If the horse could have talked, it might have mentioned that they still had a long way to go.1
On this particular day, at the beginning of this journey, financed by the Royal Academy of Sciences, Linnaeus’s horse was listless and ready to move on. Later in the journey, he would describe himself as having had barely a pen, a change of clothes, a plant press, and a wig. To have seen him then, however, it would have been clear that he had brought much more, too much, in fact, for he also had taken with him, among other things, books of ornithology and plant biology. The trip would come to mark the beginning of an age of discovery grander than the discovery of the New World. He was to go from Uppsala in the south, north along the Gulf of Bothnia on relatively well-trodden trails, until reaching Umea. From Umea, the journey would travel inland, toward the Arctic Circle and the mysterious land of the Sami (more commonly referred to as the Lapps). Although northern Sweden does not now seem like a far and untrammeled realm, in 1732 it was, by Linnaeus’s accounts, “the most barbaric tract in the whole world.”2
Linnaeus imagined that he would one day rise to greatness. But since at this point he was still green and not yet well known, he would first have to go to the field. His motivations were ones many biologists today would recognize: He was taking a journey because he was broke, he felt adventurous, and he wanted to collect plants. His father told him to go boldly. His mother did not approve. He was naive and unprepared, and yet on this journey he would begin to change biology forever.
Two thousand years ago there might have been ten thousand groups like the Sami or the Cavineños, with ten thousand languages, nearly all of them unwritten. Each language had its own names for the plants and animals. As the cultures associated with these languages changed with the invention of agriculture, cities, and writing, there were many possible futures. In most scenarios, most potential futures, the world would remain fragmented, named a thousand times in a thousand tongues. The cow might spread from place to place because of its value, but its name would be new in each place.
Eventually scientists became aware of this potential problem and tried to avoid naming species multiple times by making the names of species long and descriptive. When one had only to identify the species nearby, it was sufficient to have simple names. But when one needed to know, for example, whether the yarrow that has just been shipped from Spain is the same species that is used medicinally back home, one had to distinguish more kinds of species, many more. The effort would have to be Herculean. These new names had to convey everything about a species, everything necessary to identify it when it was seen again. For most of human history, so-called folk species had been named locally by a pair of words, a general name (army ant), and a more specific modifier on that general name (red). It is how the Cavineño name things. It is how nearly every group on Earth names the things around them. The scientists of the 1700s wanted better descriptions of species. They needed them. There were, by then, tens of species of red army ants. The scientists did what seemed obvious; they made the names longer, and longer, and longer, until the name of a single species might have ten or even several dozen words.
But this system of longer and longer names was not working. Worse yet, the problems appeared just as the number of species being discovered was dramatically expanding. Ships were bringing back species from all over the world, and even within Europe; many thousands of species were being discovered. It was rarely clear whether a species named in England and one named in Sweden, for example, were the same. Their names might be different, but describe the same species. Alternatively, the names might be the same, but describe different species. Common yarrow, a rather undistinguished plant long used in traditional medicine, became Achillea foliis duplicatopinnatis glabris, laciniis linearibus acute laciniatus, to distinguish it not just from other yarrows (of which there would eventually be dozens) but to distinguish in sufficient detail as to be able to compare it, on the basis of that string of adjectives, with all other plant species. There were thousands and soon to be tens of thousands of species to name and not enough adjectives. What was more, there was no good way to organize the species. A new plant species was compared to all other plant species, not just those it most resembled. With the system as it stood, no one could tell how many species there were, or even how many times a species had been named.
The language of science was disassembling just as many new species were being found, as societies were trying to figure out which of these new species could be put to use. The push to find new species was ultimately pragmatic. Europeans were looking for new crops, medicines, materials, and spices. The push to fix the system, to understand nature, was also to be largely pragmatic. Like the Tower of Babel, our library of life, our record of what was around us, was falling down.
Carl Linnaeus would save the common language of science. He would rescue it from the stew of names in which it was brewing. As a boy, he would call out the Latin names of the species around his house. His cradle was decorated in flowers. Put a flower in his hand and he would calm, his mother would later say. His father was an amateur botanist. He was also a minister and would instill, somehow, a particular sort of religiosity in Linnaeus, one that would allow him to believe himself chosen for this mission. His last name came from the word for the linden tree (Linnaeus would later rename the linden tree, calling it Tilia).
Linnaeus, of the linden tree, would save the language of science, but not yet. He was still traveling. As he traveled, the possibility of great discoveries was exhilarating. However, this exhilaration was balanced by the stresses of life on the road. Thunder rattled around him, spooking the horse and threatening, already, his delicate samples. Six days into the trip, he felt the need to stop and rest. The world outside Uppsala was hard and Linnaeus was soft. He already complained of his shaken body. He would soon complain of loneliness and wish he had a companion. He had not yet traveled a tenth of the distance he had planned to traverse. He was not yet off the main road. He was still staying in hotels.
After traveling on a broad road along the coast from Uppsala through smaller cities to the north, Linnaeus left Umea on foot to travel inland up the Umea River. For three days he traveled upstream. With each day, travel grew more difficult. Wide roads turned to narrow roads, narrow roads to scrambles over boulders. He would write of those days, “Never have I known a worse road…the elements combined against me. It was a mass of boulders, with great twisted tree-roots and between them potholes full of water.” Despite the difficulties, he kept collecting.
With the on-again, off-again help of local Sami guides, Linnaeus would continue both by day and, since this was summer in the Arctic, by the light of the midnight sun. The going had become “dreadful.” He and the assistants he had hired scrambled over logs and trees in the wind and the rain. They waded knee-deep through bogs and streams. For Linnaeus, had it been a punishment for a “capital offense it would still have been a cruel one.” He wished that he had never undertaken the journey. He had run out of food and none was to be had. They had gone hungry for a day and then finally, coming over a hill, found tents. There in the tents they found no one and no food. Finally, they found an older woman who, before helping Linnaeus, saw fit to remark upon his ignorance. What a poor man he was, traveling intentionally to this place of miserable dwelling, hard labor, cold, and difficulty. Hadn’t he a better place to be? He was, by his own reckoning, tired of being “like a salmon, swimming upstream to ruin.”
The farther Linnaeus went from home, the more he depended on the kindness of locals. More often than not, these locals were Sami. The Sami have lived in northern Scandinavia for thousands of years. They were there long before the Finns, Swedes, or Vikings. The first seven Sami men Linnaeus met were driving reindeer. They spoke Swedish, so Linnaeus was able to converse. Later, translation was to become more difficult, but with each interaction with the Sami, Linnaeus grew more intrigued. He drew sketches of the Sami people. He drew their boats.
Each time the Sami rescued Linnaeus from some real or perceived travail, he would describe what they did when they helped him. When they offered him a bed, he, growing perhaps more lonely, described in detail how the Sami “sleep stark naked, with only reindeer-skin coverlets.” “There is no embarrassment [except, one can presume, for Linnaeus’s], when a man or a woman stands up naked.” When he felt ill, he documented traditional medicines and delighted in the use of a fungus as an aphrodisiac. He observed a Sami man playing a magical drum. And, at every chance, he learned the names of plants and animals from the Sami.
He took much from the Sami. Much to his horse’s dismay, that included Sami clothes, drums, boots, and even a hat. He was to wear them on important occasions for the rest of his life. The most important thing he learned from the Sami, the first big lesson of his trip, was that the native peoples of the world had names for the species and landscape around them, as well as knowledge of their values and uses.
Linnaeus saw very clearly that the Sami knew things he didn’t, for he owed his very survival to their skills. They had separate names for species, separate ways of grouping species, separate uses of species. It was almost as if they had a separate science. He did not know, but there were thousands of other cultures on Earth that knew as much about the species around them as did the Sami. These other sciences, other systems of knowledge, presented problems as well as solutions for Linnaeus. The solution was that to know all the species on Earth, which he sought to do sometime soon, he might not have to track down every species de novo, not if many were known by local groups like the Sami. He was to be at the beginning of the wave of discovery of the native peoples who had themselves gone forth and discovered places all around the world.
And because ultimately Linnaeus was charged on this trip and in his later work with finding useful things for Sweden, for the good of the kingdom, it was important that he save time by talking to the locals to learn what it was in their environment that they made use of. He was to be, in part, a translator of the diverse sciences of the cultures of the world. These separate cultures, languages, and names were, he believed, the result of the destruction of the Tower of Babel by God. The realization that there were peoples like the Sami all over the world (the confounded peoples of Babel) with separate names for similar things seemed to instill in him an even deeper drive to give things one common name. God had spread the plants and animals asunder and let them be named repeatedly. Linnaeus was going to rename every species in God’s one true language, Latin, and after each name would come his own name, Linnaeus, the species’ author. He was becoming God’s collaborator. God may not have organized his creation well, but Linnaeus certainly would.
After a great deal of local help, Linnaeus eventually made it back to Umea. Very close to the main road, his travails would soon be rewarded. He was about to fall in love—with a flower. On June 12, he got down to look around and found a plant he had never seen before. He observed that the ‘blood-red” young flowers give way to the fleshy color of the full-grown corollas. The plant was “in its highest beauty, decorating the marshy grounds in a most agreeable manner.” To him, the flowers were made in the image of woman. A painter could not so closely “imitate the beauty of a fine female complexion.” It was a lovely blossom. It was like Andromeda, “as described by the poets…a virgin of most exquisite and unrivalled charms now preparing to celebrate nuptials.” The plant was “fixed on some little turfy hill in the midst of the swamps, as Andromeda was chained to a rock in the sea, which bathed her feet as the fresh water does the roots of the plant. Dragons and venomous serpents surrounded Andromeda, as toads and other reptiles” surrounded this plant. He went on to detail the similarities at more length and then drew in his notebook a comparison of Andromeda, naked and busty on a rock, next to the plant. He would go on to name the plant Andromeda polifolia. His loneliness had very clearly grown.
If the knowledge he gained of and from the Sami was Linnaeus’s first lesson, Andromeda polifolia marked the beginning of the second lesson on this journey for Linnaeus. Here was a plant that through its sexuality beckoned him (and for that matter the bees, for whom its loveliness may have been intended), but also called for understanding.* He was beginning to imagine that he could use these sex parts, the stamens and pistils, to distinguish species or at least groups of plants. Every biologist who goes to the field groups things in her or his head in order to make sense of complexity. Linnaeus had to do the same, but he was inventing his system as he went. A plant’s sex was both distinguishing and memorable. He had found a species not known in the Bible, left to grow in this obscure place after Noah’s flood, by using its male and female reproductive organs. Like nearly all that Linnaeus would do, his method was unorthodox but functional. A broader system was brewing in his head. Here, rooted in his loneliness, was a beginning.†
Linnaeus, after resting, continued on to find new things, to see what lived in northern Sweden. Like any scientist, on bad days he wondered if nearly everything had already been discovered. On good days, the whole world of possibilities seemed in front of him. The rest of the trip would be relatively uneventful, but he would find more and more new species. Ultimately, Andromeda would be among the first of hundreds of species he would name from the trip and nearly ten thousand species he would name in his life, many more species than anyone had named before him.
He returned from Lapland to congratulations from his colleagues and mentors. His trip had been a success by every practical measure—new species, new minerals, new uses for plants and animals. He would eventually publish a book, Flora Lapponica, describing the plants that he collected on his journey. It would be some time before anyone would take a careful look at Linnaeus’s other published results from the trip. When they did, they would find notes on many of the interesting things Linnaeus saw.
However, they would also find descriptions of parts of his journey that he never actually made. Linnaeus had made up the notes for those days in their entirety, including a laundry list of additional complaints, a long excursion at sea, how many weary steps he took in the countryside, and other details. How much of the rest of his notes was invented or exaggerated is unclear. But one thing was clear: He was willing to do almost anything to achieve what he wanted, whether it took the invention of a trip or acts even more sinister. Linnaeus wanted to be a fearless explorer. He was not fearless, but he was ambitious—a trait that would come in handy as he sought to name every species on Earth.
But at this point, he had barely begun. His ideas of his greatness were still just that. There were many other similarly able botanists. It was not his raw skills in the field that would make him great. It was his systems, his methods of organizing the world—methods that were born in part out of the trip to Lapland.
Regardless of how ambitious Linnaeus was, the names of species were still a mess. Even species that were well known were named, more often than not, multiple times. On top of these problems, no one seemed to know many species were left to be named. Biologists like Linnaeus looked out from Europe, scanned the sea, and imagined the world beyond. Specimens came back to Europe and informed biologists’ views, but the size of the world, and the number of kinds of organisms that populated it, was almost unfathomable. Linnaeus could only imagine a sort of bigger Sweden. But however many species there were, for there to be a single name for each species, something had to change. Scientists needed a new universal system.
For Linnaeus, the first step upon his return was to rename in Latin the species from his trip, to give new names to the species named in the Sami language. He cataloged painstakingly each thing he collected. The plants were pressed. The stones were put in bins. The animals were stretched or stuffed and mounted.
Processing the collections from his Lapland trip and from earlier forays was the beginning. The room where he worked became a museum to his mad process, the specimens themselves a catalog of the biological world, to be organized and reorganized. On one wall, he kept his Lapland outfit, ever ready, and beside it his drum and other cultural treasures. On the other wall were big plant specimens and a collection of mussels. On the remaining walls were his books, his minerals, and his instruments—a small microscope, a penknife, a scalpel, a hand lens, a metal sheath of pins, a compass. Farther back, wedged in the corners of the room, were giant pots filled with soil for growing plants, and a tree filled with thirty kinds of bird species, all calling as they clambered among the constantly breaking limbs.
Filed here and there also were pressed plants glued to sheets of paper. Already there were, by some reports, three thousand Swedish plant species alone, and then a thousand species of Swedish insects, a thousand kinds of Swedish stones. Linnaeus was re-creating the world in his small room, reorganizing these thousands of species, and doing so in a way that he found much more pleasing than what lay, messily, outside. A whole day might be dedicated to where to put the sea slugs, or where, in this scheme, he might set man.
It was one thing to name species, but unless they were organized in some way, the names were too easy to tangle, too easy to reuse or misuse. Linnaeus was not trying to understand how species were related. Natural selection and evolution were not yet part of the scientific discussion. He was more like a cook who has discovered hundreds of jars of spices with no labels. The first thing he needed to do was to group them and then, within those groups, group some more. Once they were grouped, he could poke, smell, and taste whatever was necessary, but he could not compare all the spices, could not compare all the species, not at once.
Here Linnaeus would implement the method he had derived for himself in the field, his system of sex: he would group the plant species by their sex parts. He knew it was a false category, that it did not necessarily reflect the plants’ natural groupings and relationships, but it was useful. It was also easy to remember, perhaps with a little chuckle, the genitals of plants—easier than, say, the size of leaves or the number of petals (the sorts of characteristics that his predecessors and peers used). Plants were grouped into twenty-three classes based on the size, number, and so on of their stamens (the male sex organ). They were then subgrouped according to the pistils. It would ultimately prove to be a useful grouping. For animals he would use a different system, but one that was similar in its simplicity—jawbones and teats.
Linnaeus’s new categories were for him an obvious set of divisions, because he was obsessed with the sexuality of plants. Ever since noticing lovely Andromeda on her rock, he could not ignore it. He looked at the world, a world that could be grouped by leaf size or color, root length or stem texture, and decided that the only thing worth looking at was sex. He named a plant lineage Clitoria, and discussed its labia minora and majora. He talked about the libidinous affairs of plants where the males had “multiple members.” His detractors accused him of developing a system of classification unsuited to ladies. He knew he was going too far and yet he could not stop. As obsessed as he was with plants’ sex parts, he was more obsessed with order, more obsessed with what he saw as his God-given mission to put the species straight. His system of classification based on sex parts allowed him to rename every living thing and to build an organizational system, a catalog that would allow such order.
But with his system of sexual categories, he was not Copernicus. The sun did not, in a cool moment, stop revolving around his Earth. A shift would occur as he worked, certainly, but it would be gradual. He would stop the species from spinning around humans. He finished sorting his room, at least enough to begin writing. Linnaeus would then travel more, mostly for work, but never far. He lived in Holland and England, where he continued his studies. Wherever he was, he always looked at more and more specimens and wrote ferociously. In the three years that followed his trip to Lapland, he would write, under various scientific patrons, eight books. In the process, he would become the grand Linnaeus, the namer of all things.
Linnaeus was to publish his simple system in his book Systema Naturae in 1735. It was a thin book, a dozen pages in total. The book included not only plants and animals but also those other useful things he had studied. The book caused a stir. It was, in its use of an unnatural grouping, heretical. But more important, it was useful. It was into the categories of this book that Linnaeus was about to fill the thousands of known species on Earth.
But Linnaeus’s unorthodox methods would soon face criticism. J. J. Dillenius would write to him that “you yourself will one day overthrow your own system…I consider sexual differences altogether useless, superfluous, even misleading….” Such criticisms had begun to come from all over Europe, and would come not just for the plant work, but also for his system for animals. Albrecht von Haller, for example, said, “The unbounded dominion which Linnaeus has assumed in the animal kingdom must upon the whole be abhorrent to many. He has considered himself a second Adam, and given names to all the animals according to their distinctive features, without ever bothering about his predecessors.”3 That his criticisms were so broad and so frequent suggested he was growing in reputation. He and his system were, with each more public critique, better known.
Linnaeus had already been incredibly bold, but had he simply offered a new way of grouping plants, or a new amendment to the old ways of grouping animals, his method might not have caught on. He wanted to redo things, to make them easier, and toward this end he would make one more change. His last big contribution, the one for which he is best known, and which would increase dramatically his ability to name many thousands of species, would come accidentally. When Linnaeus began his work, remember, species were named with long names that encoded descriptions of their traits. He tired, in his many publications, of writing out these long names. In his field guides for students, he began to write names out more simply, one general name, referring to the group to which a species belonged, and one more specific name, distinguishing the species from others within the group. The details of each species’ life history could then be written elsewhere.
The idea of using two names to describe a species is ancient. In most cultures, including, for example, the Cavineño, species are named according to groups loosely corresponding to what we now call genera (the plural of genus—the Homo of Homo sapiens) and then with species discriminated within those genera (the sapiens of Homo sapiens). Our brains group things and then subdivide them. Linnaeus had stumbled upon what indigenous peoples around the world already knew. The Sami described species with two names, calling, for example, the Common Loon, now named Gavia immer, (though not by Linnaeus, who apparently missed it) áhpedovtta, for “sea-diver.” Diver was the folk genus and sea the folk species meant to distinguish the sea diver from other kinds of divers. Linnaeus would do like the Sami, if not for the loon, which he did not see though surely heard, then for thousands of other species. But to do this he had to ignore several hundred years of established scientific practice.
Needless to say, the fact that we call ourselves Homo sapiens (as just one example) or that I have written the Common Loon’s name Gavia immer, means that Linnaeus’s method caught on. In the rule-books of naming species, any name that was given before Linnaeus’s method is regarded as invalid. Linnaeus began a renaming of all of the species of Earth. Anyone else, using any other system, whether living or dead, was to be disregarded. This was a muscular act of arrogance, necessary to reconstruct the Tower of Babel from the rubble.*
Linnaeus saw that his field shorthand for genera and species was catching on. He knew enough to go with it. He began to use the genus-species system quickly and then continued to use his sexual system to categorize plant species. In his book Species Plantarum, he established his binomial (two-name) system for plants. He would extend it to all kinds of life in a later edition of Systema Naturae. Linnaeus’s problem, to the extent that he had one, was that he was exhausting the species of Sweden, and then of Europe, and then even of the explorers who had gone farther afield. To name every species, he needed specimens from farther and farther corners of the world. He began to send his students out into the world. In their travels, they would find both new species and new peoples who already knew about those species. Linnaeus had met and learned from the Sami, and now his students would learn from the Amazonians and Japanese.
Linnaeus, despite or perhaps even because of his obsession with finding and naming species, was popular with his students. They would all remember fondly their forays into the field around his house (later palace). Dressed in frivolous outfits, they would go out in large numbers to collect as Linnaeus walked more slowly behind, offering names and insight, all the while dressed in his now very old Lapland outfit. A band would walk alongside them playing as they returned. “Hoorah Linnaeus. Hoorah!”
The students would be inspired by Linnaeus’s knowledge of plants, but also by the possibilities of his new system. Within Linnaeus’s lifetime, his names for things were becoming the dominant names for things. He was writing the dictionary of life, but he, greedily, wanted more species. He bought boat fares to send his students abroad. He paid them to go to Brazil, to South Africa, to Australia. They were to find everything. God created; Linnaeus organized and named. He was like Adam but far more eager, more ambitious, vainer, more willing, without thinking, to put his students at risk for his own scientific glory. His students might not yet have known it, but everything they brought back, every single species,* every document, every report and paper, would ultimately bear only Linnaeus’s name. The band’s trumpets played for him alone.
Among Linnaeus’s materials for the study of life there were hand lenses, perhaps even a microscope, notebooks, and the like. But his main tool was a set of cabinets. For Linnaeus, it was these cabinets and their system through which he saw the world. Galileo looked out through a telescope, Linnaeus through categories and names.
The cabinets were wooden and, given the greatness of the man, unadorned.4 On one cabinet, a simple flower pattern was all that interrupted the wood’s line. In the cabinets were small shelves, and between the shelves perhaps evidence of where other shelves, other layers, might be inserted. The cabinet is most often compared to a kind of library, but it was far more than that.
In a traditional herbarium, like those of Linnaeus’s peers, and those before his time, the plants were presented artfully on sheets, the sheets were glued together to make books, and then the books were arranged on shelves. One layer of scholarship would be layered upon the next. Books could be reordered, but not the pages within them.
In Linnaeus’s herbarium, the plants were just on sheets. They were unbound. There were no elegant bindings, just the unkempt pages of life. The advantage of this seeming inelegance was fluidity; the pages could be arranged yearly, monthly, even daily in light of new specimens or new insights. Things that seemed to be different species could be united when an intermediate was found. Specimens that seemed similar might be divided when some new trait was noticed. Here Linnaeus could fan the species of the world out like a deck of cards, and arrange them as he felt appropriate.
Linnaeus’s cabinets have framed all of biology—literally at the time, and now figuratively. We have made subtle changes to aspects of his method. We have changed some of his names for species, but more have stayed the same. A wolf is still Canis lupus and most of the species you know now, species you might find in your own garden, driveway, or even bedroom were named by Linnaeus. That includes your dog, but also cows, nightjars, caimans, box crabs, Muscovy ducks, cane toads, great hornbills, snowy owls, water buffalo, bald eagles, southern hog-nosed snakes, American bison, boa constrictors, and no fewer than ten thousand other species. He even named humans Homo sapiens. Unless you live in the heart of the Congo, nearly every species you see on a daily basis, nearly every common species, would be given its official, universal, scientific name by Linnaeus.
It is meaningful that we have retained Linnaeus’s names for the species in our world. Perhaps more important, although we have replaced his sexual system with a new group of categories, our system for grouping remains the same, as does our system for naming. We reorder the specimen sheets, now on computers, each year. We make, through time, better systems. We rearrange again. Linnaeus offered a fuzzy window into the entirety of life. It is easy to laugh at the arrogance with which he approached his days, the idea that he might name everything or even that he could and should be the one to rename all the species with their true names. All else notwithstanding, he did what he set out to do—to name everything he could find. He had predecessors and competitors who deserve more credit than they typically get. John Ray was more careful in his study of the plants than Linnaeus, and Linnaeus would take some ideas from Ray. Linnaeus’s friend, Peter Artedi, would contribute to Linnaeus’s system and then die before he could gain his own recognition. Linnaeus, in the end, took credit for naming nearly all of the common things. He was mad in a way, but brilliant, too, in his obsession. He wrote the universal dictionary of life, to which all the rest, every name after him, would just be a matter of adding more words.