Linnaeus’s coat of arms, with twinflowers and central egg
Nineteen
A General Prototype
In November of 1761, to commemorate the tenth year of his reign, King Adolf Frederick of Sweden celebrated with several public acts of largesse. One of them was the bestowal of a knighthood upon Professor Linnaeus of Uppsala.
Linnaeus had already collected minor honors from the royal family. He’d been named to the Order of the Polar Star, a recent creation of the king to reward Swedish academics and civil servants, and along with several other physicians he shared the ceremonial title of archiater, or royal doctor (Linnaeus did not practice medicine, in court or elsewhere). But now Adolf Frederick wished to elevate him to genuine nobility as part of the Riddarklassen, the Class of Knights. It was a modest ennoblement, conferring no lands or seat in a deliberative body. But it did allow him to be addressed as Sir, to assume a genteel surname of his own creation, and to adopt a coat of arms.
The man who had named so many species particularly relished naming himself. After some deliberation, he shed Linnaeus for von Linné (although this text shall continue to refer to him as the former). The name was a curious hybrid. Von, a German prefix, was used by Swedish gentry, but only among those who could at least claim some German ancestry; Linnaeus could not. But Linné, a unique coinage, seemed to be at least vaguely French. Why combine allusions to two countries he had visited only fleetingly and whose languages he could not understand? No explanation is recorded. But it did have the effect of making him seem worldly, far removed from the stony fields of Småland province.
The newly minted Sir Carl von Linné also acquired property, using a cache of funds from what would prove to be his only profitable foray into scientific entrepreneurship. While studying mollusks, he’d hit upon a reliable method of seeding pearls in oysters, a method he presented to the Swedish government as a trade secret. It was not truly a trade secret—Asian countries had been cultivating pearls for centuries—and Sweden made no serious effort to enter the pearl industry. But by way of thanks a secret vote of Parliament awarded him 450 pounds, which he used to purchase Hammarby, a small farm nine miles southeast of Uppsala. As he began transforming it into a proper estate befitting a member of the Riddarklassen, he also addressed another privilege attached to his ennoblement: designing a heraldic coat of arms for the House of von Linné.
In his application to the king he proposed a shield with three fields of color, representing the three kingdoms (black for the mineral kingdom, red for the animal kingdom, and green for the plant kingdom), surmounted by a lone twinflower and emblazoned by a fertilized egg (“to betoken nature which is continued and perpetuated in an egg,” as the application reads). For the family motto he proposed Ex Ovo Omnia (Everything Comes from the Egg), which struck Sweden’s official heraldists as too eccentric; they rejected it and substituted Famam Extendere Factis (Fame Through Deeds).
The House of von Linné’s coat of arms, however, retained the egg as a centerpiece. Linnaeus was uncertain of the mechanics of reproduction, but he was certain of the raw materials.
Linnaeus genuinely believed in ex ovo omnia. He was a fervent ovist, which meant he held that the female egg contained everything needed to produce the next generation—the role of the male was to “excite” and trigger the process, not to contribute to it. He’d made this clear in the first edition of Systema Naturae, writing:
If we observe God’s works, it becomes more than sufficiently evident to everyone, that each living being is propagated from an egg and that every egg produces an offspring closely resembling the parent. Hence no new species are produced nowadays.
Ovism was just one theory. Aristotle, in The Generation of Animals, believed that the female’s primary contribution was her internal supply of menstrual blood, which the male semen used as the material for frothing up an embryo. (This, he believed, explained why women stop menstruating when pregnant.) Yet Aristotle was at a loss to explain a crucial point: Why do children resemble their parents to various degrees? In 1651, William Harvey published Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium, or On Animal Generation, postulating that the female’s entire body is “irradiated” by an “aura seminalis” that somehow began gestation; resemblance was a matter of the strength of that aura. Epicurus and others thought that the female must internally produce her own version of semen as well, and that their mixture begins the process of generation. These were different paths toward explaining why children can resemble their mothers as well as their fathers, but all were speculations.
It was not until 1669 that Jan Swammerdam, a Dutch scientist participating in early microscopic studies, formulated a theory that all animals come from an egg produced by a female of the same species. This was quite the leap, since at the time insects were widely believed to spontaneously generate, and mammalian eggs had never been observed. Still, Linnaeus and other ovists took their existence as an article of faith.
Animalculists, on the other hand, believed that it was the male contribution that mattered. And they had physical evidence to point to, since in 1677 the pioneering microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek had discovered “animalcules” in the semen of humans and other mammals, which we now call spermatozoa. The discovery led to Leeuwenhoek’s claim (again, not backed up by observational evidence) that “it is exclusively the male semen that forms the foetus and that all the woman may contribute only serves to receive the semen and feed it.” In 1694, Nicolaas Hartsoeker went so far as to claim that animalcules contained “homunculi,” tiny but fully formed humans requiring the mother only for incubation.
Buffon considered ovist and animalculists equally ridiculous. Despite their different assumptions, each took as a given that life was seeded—that it was contained and conveyed in a minuscule unit generally called the “germ,” which the sexual act merely activated. But this posed a logistical problem: Since the newly emerged lifeform also gave rise to future generations, themselves germinated, did that mean the germ itself contained even smaller germs? Did a chicken emerge from the eggshell somehow containing the seeds of all chickens that will descend from it in the future? Buffon described such theories of reproduction as “that which suppose the thing already done.” To believe in such a concept was “not only to admit that one does not know how it happens, [but to] abandon the will to think about it.” He believed there were no series of nesting minuscules but “an ever-active organic matter, always given over to shaping itself, to making itself, and to producing beings similar to those which house it.”
What was this force, or process, or principle? To delve further into the question he imported the British microscopist John Needham and set up a laboratory in Montbard with the most sophisticated instruments then available. “If we do not succeed in explaining the mechanism by which Nature accomplishes reproduction,” he wrote, “we shall at least arrive at something that has far more appearance of truth than anything that has thus far been proposed.” Together, Buffon and Needham examined the reproductive tracts of various animals drawn from Montbard’s menagerie, and after several months of study they announced a momentous discovery: They had observed a female “spermatic fluid” in the ovaries of a dog.
They were, of course, wrong. It is unclear what they had actually witnessed, but it was not female sperm. Their confusion is understandable: Even the best microscopes of the era were primitive by modern standards (the true choreography of fertilization, the interaction of sperm and egg, would not be discovered until 1875). Still, the mistaken impression led Buffon in an important direction. Paired seminal fluids implied an intermingling, a joint contribution to the reproductive process by male and female. This made him lean in favor of epigenesis, the theory that the “recipe,” so to speak, for creating a fetus was comprised of an interplay of instructions between the two genders. Epigenesis would explain why a child might have their father’s nose and their mother’s eyes, and why a sibling’s features might be vice versa. It would also explain why some offspring were stillborn and others greatly deformed: The interplay of instructions had somehow gone wrong.
What was the nature of these instructions? While they might be effectively invisible, that was no bar to studying them as a force. After all, no one had actually “seen” electricity, but most people had observed means by which it could be processed, transmitted, and stored. Gravity was both omnipresent and unobservable, yet its laws could be discerned. “There is in Nature a general prototype in each species on which each individual is modeled,” Buffon wrote, “but which seems, in realizing itself, to alter itself or perfect itself according to circumstances.”
So that, relative to certain qualities, this is an extraordinary appearing variation in the succession of these individuals, and at the same time a constancy which appears wonderful in the entire species. The first animal, the first horse, for example, has been the external mode of the moule intérieur, on which all horses which have been born, all those which now exist, and all those which will be born have been formed.
The moule intérieur was Buffon’s term for nature’s general prototype, the mechanism molding, or giving form to, organic matter and dictating reproduction. While its literal meaning is “internal mold,” Buffon did not intend for it to be taken literally: A mold, by definition, cannot be on the inside of a form. Contemporary translators have concluded it might best be rendered in English as the “internal matrix.”
This matrix was something he could only point to, not discover—the technology of the day was far too limited. But biologists would later recognize this as the first rough sketch of a working theory of reproduction. “If a physician were to attempt today to explain the functioning of the genes and the formation of the zygote in a highly simplified way to an intelligent child,” science historians Otis Fellows and Stephen Milliken concluded two centuries later, “one totally ignorant of even the most basic concepts of chemistry, with no knowledge whatsoever of the structure of the cell, and with only the fuzziest notions of microorganisms, his explanation would inevitably bear a strong resemblance to Buffon’s system.”
Discovering the internal matrix, or even sounding its workings in greater detail, were tasks Buffon reluctantly left to future generations. Documenting the quadrupeds continued to consume every moment of his working hours. Published in 1760, the eighth volume of the Histoire covered sixteen species, from the guinea pig to the agouti. Especially vivid was his excursus on the beaver, a living specimen of which he’d exported, at great cost, from Canada to the Jardin du Roi. “One day he escaped and descended by a cellar stair into the caverns of the old quarries that are under the Jardin,” Buffon wrote. “He fled a long way, swimming in the rank water on the bottom of the caverns; nevertheless, as soon as he saw the light of the torches that I had brought there in search for him, he came.”
He is friendly without being affectionate or caressing, his requests are made through a little plaintive cry or a few gestures…. He gnaws away at everything that comes in his way, cushions, furniture, or trees. The barrel in which he was shipped had to be reinforced with sheets of tin.
Buffon wrote on. Volume nine, devoted to the great cats (lion, tiger, panther, cougar, leopard), the hyena, the civet, and the black wolf, arrived in 1761. Volume ten (peccaries, opossums, pangolins, marmosets) followed in 1762.