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HOMO SAPIENS

As early as March 1753, Carl Nilsson Linnæus complained about his workload. Later on, when he had been knighted and changed his name to Carl von Linnaeus, he again brought up this grievance. In 1761, he wrote to a friend:

I lecture every day for an hour in public and afterwards give private instruction to a number of pupils … Having thus talked for five hours before lunch, in the afternoon I correct work, prepare my manuscripts for the printers and write letters to my botanical friends, visit the garden and deal with people who want to consult me … with the result that often I hardly have a moment to eat … While my colleagues daily enjoy the pleasures of this existence, I spend days and nights in the exploration of a field of learning that thousands of them will not suffice to bring to completion, not to mention that every day I have to squander time on correspondence with various scholars — all of which will age me prematurely.*

[* Müller-Wille, Staffan and Charmantier, Isabelle, ‘Natural history and information overload: The case of Linnaeus’, ‘Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences’, Volume 43, Issue 1, March 2012, pages 4–15 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848611001130]

There was so much knowledge he had already acquired and yet still so much more that remained to be discovered — and all of it needed to be organised, noted, sorted, and then entered in tables, charts, publications, footnotes, and lectures. Risk of burnout, one might say. But work itself wasn’t the only thing stressing him out — he was also under pressure for the same reasons people get burned out nowadays: information overload.

In the Linnean Society offices in London, one can find his collection of biological samples of 14,300 plants, 168 fish, 3,000 shellfish, and 3,198 insects, as well as a library of 1,600 books and over 4,000 letters and manuscripts. At the pinnacle of his career, Linnaeus was the centre of a tight network of correspondence covering Europe and beyond. Friends and researchers sent him new discoveries at the same time as they discussed, criticised, and supplemented the old. He had a number of adepts, so-called apostles, whom he sent on assignments around the world, to Russia, the Middle East, West Africa, and China, and who reported home in letters, and sent books and biological samples. And all of it had to be sorted into the correct botanical genera, checked against previously received information, named, updated, and classified. Carl von Linnaeus worked day and night.

His motto was Omnia mirari etiam tritissima — Marvel at everything, even the commonplace. But there is nothing commonplace about his achievement within natural science. Over a hundred years ahead of Charles Darwin presenting his theory of evolution, Linnaeus made it possible by thinking the unthinkable when he classified the human being as a primate and sorted her into the same family as the monkey. In order to distinguish humans from other mammals, he invented a special description: Homo sapiens, the knowledgeable man. In spite of this distinction, academics and theologians were outraged by the shocking act of equating the image of God with a monkey’s.

Linnaeus certainly believed in God. But his starting point was that, although God had created all living things, there existed a hierarchical structure in the world and it was Linnaeus’ mission to uncover it. By doing so, he opened a line of thought for Charles Darwin to develop a scientific truth in which both nature itself and human evolution could be explained without God. (By the way, Darwin considered Carl von Linnaeus as one of his three gods, side by side with the French fossilist Georges Cuvier, and, of course, Aristotle.)

Linnaeus had been on the verge of burnout for years. Visitors to his hometown of Uppsala described him as unshaven, with dusty shoes and socks, wearing an old green smock. But there were things to be solved. He who organised God’s Nature lacked a good method of organising. Already in the 1750s, when he had sorted the Swedish queen’s collection of butterflies, he had experimented with paper cards. One of his colleagues then travelled to London and organised Sloane’s Collection at the British Museum according to Linnaeus’ principle. However, the system that had worked for a collection of butterflies did not suffice for all the various pieces of knowledge and facts that continually swept towards him from the world. God created, Linnaeus sorted. For this purpose he needed an adjustable structure, where he could easily add new knowledge and just as easily erase inaccuracies; it ought to be possible to arrange it linearly, chronologically, alphabetically, or whichever way he wanted. Around 1767, he began using a system of thick paper cards; thousands of cards of the same size. They could be stored in boxes, sorted, provide information that led to other cards and thereby could tie his body of research together. In short, he created a searchable system of information he could easily supervise.

He might have been inspired by playing cards. In his time, the back of the card was left blank for notes to be made, and many researchers and academics used them much in the same way we now use post-its. (Playing cards have been found beneath the floorboards of the Linnaeus home.) Whatever the case, he invented the index card, according to research by Isabelle Charmantier of the Linnean Society and Professor Staffan Müller-Wille from the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter.* Not until 1780, two years after Linnaeus’ death, did Vienna’s Court Library introduce a card catalogue, the first of its kind.**

[* Müller-Wille, Staffan and Charmantier, Isabelle, ‘Carl Linnaeus’s botanical paper slips (1767–1773)’, ‘Intellectual History Review’, Volume 24, Issue 2, 2014, pages 215–238 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17496977.2014.914643]

[** Blei, Daniela, ‘How the Index Card Cataloged the World’, The Atlantic, 1 December 2017 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/how-the-index-card-catalogued-the-world/547271/]

Homo sapiens is the knowledgeable human being; the fact-gathering, perceptive creature who seeks to broaden the world by naming, arranging, and understanding it. Thus it was himself Carl von Linnaeus named, sorted, and catalogued. Just as he observed the world, he observed himself, and no one personified Homo sapiens like him. As a result, Sweden (and the rest of the world) was left with a legacy of structuring reality through records, accounts, and lists. Criminal records, telephone databases, death records, birth records, property records, drug records, Windrush landing-cards records, tax records, just to mention a few.