The 10th edition of Systema Naturae listed 564 species of bird – including many then recently discovered tropical forms – classified according to the general characters of their beaks and feet.
11 : Systema Naturae (10th edition) by Carolus Linnaeus
1758
The 10th edition of Systema Naturae listed 564 species of bird – including many then recently discovered tropical forms – classified according to the general characters of their beaks and feet.
Whether you’re a birder or an ornithologist, it’s always useful to know where a species perches on the tree of life. We need a rational and logical classification system in which to do this, and since we now know that all bird species have evolved from a series of common ancestors, it would be logical for that classification to follow evolutionary history as closely as possible, but also for it to be ‘linear’ to be comprehensible.
But linearity and historical reality are contradictory in evolutionary terms. We know that the story of evolution is continuously branching; some sort of sense can be introduced by trying to put the order of the branching of the major groups – justified orders and families – in a roughly chronological sequence.
After Ray and Willughby’s valiant attempts to classify birds into physical types and major habitats, the problem remained that the manner in which species originated was still unknown. However, the way plants and animals were ordered was about to be revolutionised by an ingenious expedient: they would be given names that described an organism’s place and relationships in a hierarchy in simple terms. This would involve a two-part scientific name to indicate to scientists and the science-literate laity exactly where it was thought an organism lay in the grand biological scheme.
Scientific names as we know them today – the binomial of a genus and a species qualifier – were first established in a consistent way by Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (born Carl von Linné) in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae way back in 1758. Previously, organisms had been identified by unwieldy and lengthy descriptive Latin phrases. The Linnaean hierarchy and genus-species system has been retained ever since, with the addition of a sometimes still controversial trinomial for subspecies.
Dissatisfied with the then current mode of classifying living organisms, Linnaeus gradually developed his more intuitive system based on morphological similarity, beginning with the stamens and pistils of flowering plants in what was termed his sexual system. Written during a three-year stay in The Netherlands from 1735 to 1739, the Systema was under constant revision, and the 10th edition also featured prescient innovations such as the placement of whales in the class Mammalia, and the classification of humans with monkeys.
Linnaeus – no slouch at self-promotion – was reputed to have said more than once that ‘God created, Linnaeus organised’, and his hierarchy of kingdoms, classes, orders, genera, species and ‘varieties’ has passed down the years relatively intact. It remains both easy to understand and the standard method of classifying plants and animals to demonstrate their relationships to one another, despite the development of the theory of evolution and our detailed and growing knowledge of the genome.