KEY POINTS:
Happy anniversary: the man who gave us the key to the natural world was born 300 years ago yesterday. Carl Linnaeus, who created the system of scientific names that we still use for all living things, began life in a turf-roofed farmstead in southern Sweden on May 23, 1707.
He is the world's most famous Swede, surpassing in renown even the warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus, Strindberg, Ingmar Bergman and Abba. His face has decorated Swedish banknotes since 1894.
Since shortly after his death, Linnaeus' library, letters, papers and specimens, which make up one of the world's great scientific treasure-troves, have been in the care of the Linnean Society of London, at Burlington House, in London. The King of Sweden has just visited them. The Emperor of Japan (a keen marine biologist) is about to do so. Amid many celebratory meetings a recent issue of Nature, the world's leading scientific journal, was given over to Linnaeus' legacy.
These are timely reminders of an immense achievement. It's those two words of Latin, the first beginning with a capital letter and the second without, printed in italics and impossible to remember for most of us, that you sometimes see following the ordinary name of a plant, a fish, a mammal, an insect, a bird. Take, for instance, the raven: Corvus corax.
Why not just call it a raven and have done with it? Until you remember that in France, a raven is a grand corbeau. In Germany, it's a kolkrabe, while in Linnaeus' own Sweden it's a korp, never mind what it's called as you travel to Japan and Korea and China. Yet a biologist from any one of them can talk about a raven to a biologist from any other, and know they are referring to the same organism, because they both accept that this member of the crow family, for which they each have a different common name, is also universally known, scientifically, as Corvus corax, the name that Carl Linnaeus bestowed upon it 2 1/2 centuries ago.
How important this is starts to dawn on you when you realise how great is the variety of life on Earth. There are about 10,000 bird species in the world, and about half that number of mammals. There are more than 400,000 species of plants that have so far been described, and much more than a million species of insects, with perhaps another two to three million still to be discovered. And as with species, so with languages. The Earth is a Tower of Babel, with more than 6000 languages across the globe.
Even if you restricted the official naming of living things to a dozen of the world's major tongues the linguistic barrier to dealing with the bewildering extent of the planet's biodiversity would be instantly insuperable. But Linnaeus' system of scientific names has given a framework for exploring and understanding the teeming life of the world, and we have never needed it more than now, when so much is increasingly threatened with extinction.
It works for two reasons. Firstly, it's in an international language. Latin offers a worldwide level playing field, without any taint of cultural imperialism. Secondly (and this is its brilliance) it consists of just two words, which enable the subject to be designated precisely, and in the most succinct way possible.
The first is known as the generic name, and represents the genus, or grouping of species the creature belongs to. With the raven, Corvus (the Latin word for crow) signifies the genus, which groups together black crows. The second word is known as the specific name, and marks out, within the genus, the individual species. So corax (the Greek word for raven) designates the biggest of the black crows. And by extension Corvus corone, the carrion crow; Corvus frugilegus, the rook, and Corvus monedula, the jackdaw. (Linnaeus named all those as well, by the way).
The system is formally known as binomial nomenclature - "two-name naming". Linnaeus hit upon the trick while carrying out a massive and ambitious survey of all known plants, for although he eventually applied it to creatures of every type, he was first and foremost a botanist - one of history's most eminent.
Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe's plantsmen (they weren't called botanists yet) worked tirelessly at trying to bring order to a flood of new and unfamiliar species as collectors brought rarities from China, Japan, India and southern Africa as well as from the Americas. The plantsmen used Latin, of course, then the undisputed international language of learning; and they increasingly tended to tag each species not with a name, but a long Latin descriptive phrase ("A blue-green cabbage with a hairy stem and jagged leaves"). The trouble was that my descriptive phrase wasn't necessarily the same as yours. Confusion reigned.
This was the situation when Linnaeus was born in Rashult in southern Sweden; the son of the local pastor, Nils Nicolaus Linnaeus. He was intended for the church, but rejected that for a career in botany (as plant science had now been named by the English naturalist John Ray), getting his start at Uppsala, Sweden's (and indeed Northern Europe's) oldest university.
The essential fact about Linnaeus is not that he was a very good botanist (although he was) nor that he was enormously productive (he was that too) but that he possessed a quite overweening intellectual ambition. Not a few historical figures have wanted to conquer the whole world; but Carl Linnaeus, the boy from the Swedish backwoods, wanted from an early age to order it intellectually. One of the great surprises of history is that he ended up doing so.
Maybe you need ego for real success in science. Although he inspired genuine devotion in his students, some of Linnaeus' pronouncements were singularly lacking in modesty. ("I have fundamentally reorganised the whole field of Natural History, raising it to the height it has now attained," he wrote when he was famous. "I doubt whether anyone today could hope, without my help and guidance, to make any advance in this field.") And he started early. In 1735, for example, he published in the Netherlands a classification of the whole of the known natural world entitled Systema Naturae ("The System of Nature"). At just 28.
It's a huge but thin book, a massive set of diagrams, really, and Linnaeus' own copy is in the Linnean Society's temperature-controlled strongroom in Burlington House. Linnaeus' library, papers and specimens were bought in 1784 for £1088 5s 0d by James Edward Smith, a wealthy young Briton passionately interested in natural history, and became the rock on which the Linnean Society of London was founded in 1788.
It was one of the world's leading scientific societies (and it was at a meeting of the Linnean on July 1, 1858, that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was given its first public airing). In the strongroom you can see all Linnaeus' books, all his letters, all his preserved specimens from butterflies to fishes, and you can also see something else: his mind working towards his great idea.
In Linnaeus' 1737 catalogue of all the plants in the garden of George Clifford, an English merchant living in Holland, the tomato is called Solanum caule inermi annuo, foliis pinnatis incisis (nightshade with a smooth annual stem with incised pinnate [on opposite sides of the stalk] leaves). He gives for reference four or five further descriptive Latin phrases, some similar, that other botanists used.
Sixteen years later in Species Plantarum, his massive 1753 catalogue of all known plants there are the Latin descriptive phrases once more (slightly altered now). But there, on the margin, next to each one, is also a single word. Next to the phrase for tomato there is the single word lycopersicum (it means "wolf peach"). In that moment, the scientific name for the tomato became Solanum lycopersicum and it has remained so to this day.
Linnaeus had had the crucial insight that names could be scientifically accurate without lengthy description; they merely needed to designate their subject.
The botanical world saw the point and adopted the system virtually immediately. Five years later, in another book, Linnaeus applied it to creatures. From Homo sapiens down, every organism was from then on given a Linnaean-style name.
Perhaps his naming system is now so much a part of our intellectual currency that we forget what an advance it was. I would compare it to another huge intellectual leap by Western society: the adoption of Arabic numerals, which made complex mathematics and technology possible.
Carl Linnaeus' nomenclature enabled humankind to order and comprehend the wonderful variety of life on Earth, and now, when we are destroying so much of that life, we should celebrate him more than ever.
- INDEPENDENT
