God Created, Linnaeus Organized: The Man Who Brought Order to Biology
Author: Sirius King
Proofreader: Millisecond
Biology consultant and reviewer: Kuicao
What kind of achievement makes someone successful? Some say becoming a billionaire or the world’s richest person; others say being known everywhere. Then what makes someone immortal? Some say a name in the history books; others, a monument and a biography. One man was poor, ill, and little known during his lifetime, and rose in social rank only in his later years. Today his portrait appears on Swedish banknotes, his statues stand on university campuses, biologists revere him, and his country commemorates him. He was the Swedish naturalist, father of modern biological taxonomy, pioneer of binomial nomenclature, and “Prince of Flowers”: Carl von Linnaeus.
Linnaeus and the linden tree
At first, he was simply Carl Linnaeus. The prefix von indicated that a family was, or had once been, noble. In fact, his ancestors had been fierce but never wealthy. Linnaeus came from Småland, and Swedes can trace their ancestry back to the Vikings. His father, Nils Linnaeus, fashioned the surname Linnaeus from the linden tree—lind in Swedish—at the family’s old home. Perhaps it was fate: although Nils was a pastor, he had a strong interest in plants and gave Linnaeus his first grounding in natural history and botany. Growing up in that household, the young Linnaeus showed a love of botany from an early age. His primary-school teacher and headmaster encouraged that interest as well.
Linnaeus the physician
Like fathers everywhere, Nils dearly hoped that young Linnaeus would follow him into the clergy. Yet a person’s development often runs counter to other people’s expectations and is deeply shaped by education. When Carl was nineteen, a secondary-school teacher told Nils that his son could never become a scholar or pastor, though he might become a doctor. Physicians at the time often doubled as botanists, but this was still far from what Nils had expected. Rothman, Nils’s doctor and Carl’s teacher, agreed to teach Carl medicine and believed that medicine offered him “a respectable and profitable career.” Nils must have felt as if his first character build had failed. Fortunately, his younger son Samuel eventually became a pastor, which restored some cheer. Linnaeus first attended the university in Lund, then transferred to Uppsala University the following year. Poor as he was, he studied medicine throughout, but one university’s medical faculty lacked teachers while the other’s existed in name only. That “respectable and profitable career” now looked like a dream. These universities had no professional ethics: they tricked and ambushed this poor twenty-one-year-old. Was that right? No, it was not. Did he still have a chance?
When God closes one door, he opens another. On the dean’s recommendation, Linnaeus became an instructor for botanical demonstrations during his second year. It was his first time teaching before a class, and it offered another possible path. Still, one question is hard to avoid: in a university that large, was putting a second-year student in charge of a course—even one who had written a paper—really anything other than letting him make things up at the lectern?
Linnaeus the field researcher
To prove his ability, and perhaps secure a professorship one day, Linnaeus needed credentials. In 1732, with funding from the Royal Swedish Society of Sciences, he undertook a natural-history expedition to what was then the wilderness of Lapland. (That is Lapland, not Lappland, for any Doctors who have lost all sanity—please read carefully.) The route is shown below.
The expedition suited both his interests and his future career, but the grant was only four hundred thalers. The sources available to the author do not establish what that sum could buy, though it appears to have been very little. A game may now let us admire the scenery of Scandinavia and its surroundings, but in real life you cannot restore your stamina on wild berries alone. Unlike his ancestors, Linnaeus plainly had no chance to raid England in a longship. We cannot know how he endured five months made interminable by hunger, exhaustion, and poverty. Perhaps it was the toughness bred into the people of Småland; perhaps he drew strength from the creed he always held, “God created, Linnaeus organized.” Although the report he later submitted contained invention and exaggeration, his diary unquestionably records the hardship: warmth came mostly from shivering, cooking scarcely happened, the food was barely edible, and road conditions changed constantly. At a time when a single soaking could kill, he had to travel while collecting plant and animal specimens and recording local customs. It was genuinely hard. Calling his claims fraudulent boasting misses the point; he was pitching to investors. The journey left him full of admiration for the people of Lapland and especially fond of twinflower and chickweed wintergreen. It yielded two books: Flora Lapponica and his diary.
Back in Uppsala, Linnaeus earned money by giving private lessons on minerals. During this period he met the love of his life, Sara. In the long run she was not a good wife, and their marriage was unhappy. At the time, however, Linnaeus boldly proposed and won her hand—perhaps the generous dowry helped. Unlike most newly engaged men, he then accepted work as a private tutor and accompanied his student all the way to the Netherlands. There, his academic spring would begin.
Linnaeus advanced academically in the Netherlands. At twenty-eight, he obtained a medical doctorate in roughly a week (yes, he bought it cheaply), and Systema Naturae was published that same year. In those countries, he met and corresponded with many botanists and examined collections of rare specimens. In 1737 he wrote Genera Plantarum. The young Linnaeus swept through the Netherlands and other countries; before turning thirty, he had already made a name for himself—everywhere except home.
Professor Linnaeus
God seems to have played one joke too many on Linnaeus. Other men “rise to high office, then return home in wealth and honor.” He came home with neither fame nor fortune. Worse, after finding almost both abroad, he nearly lost his fiancée at home because a rumor claimed he had died overseas. With God having shut the door, sealed the windows, and nearly blocked the dog flap, Linnaeus had no choice but to work as an unlicensed Western-style doctor in Stockholm. A chair in medicine opened at Uppsala University in 1741, though the competition was fierce. Through ability, maneuvering, and connections, Linnaeus fought his way to the lectern. He was no longer the second-year student he had been. His teaching was anything but improvised: Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, Systema Naturae, and Genera Plantarum showed his training; he had explored Lapland and spent three years abroad. Clearly, he came prepared. Professor Linnaeus gathered many students and sent them around the world on scientific expeditions, as shown below.
Such effort naturally paid off. In 1750, Linnaeus became rector of Uppsala University. With a leading botanist on campus and his disciples gathering material everywhere, the days when medicine and botany existed only in name were over. Between 1753 and 1769, Linnaeus produced Species Plantarum and the tenth edition of Systema Naturae. The former applied binomial nomenclature throughout the plant kingdom; the latter applied it throughout the animal kingdom. Modern taxonomy was established.
Linnaeus at home
Outside the university, Linnaeus had a full private life. He and his wife raised one son and four daughters, but the cub did not match the tiger: the younger Linnaeus seemed interested only in pleasure. Linnaeus thought still less of his daughters. He did not want them to be dolls, but he wanted even less for them to become female scholars, so he refused to let them study French or pursue advanced education. Even judged in its historical setting, that decision was not a wise one. In fact, Linnaeus was a poor parent. In 1753, he was made a Knight of the Order of the Polar Star. A knight was not a nobleman, but ranked above a commoner.* Linnaeus was delighted, though he could hardly have guessed that greater honors awaited him in old age. His early exertions seem to have aged him beyond his peers. In 1754, his son Johannes was born, and the new life appeared to bring hope to the family. Tragically, Johannes died in 1757. Since losing his father in 1748, Linnaeus had now lost both parents and two children, and he remained poor. The sequence of blows was enough to make him consider retirement. The following year, he bought two rural estates. To meet the mortgage payments, he developed and patented a method for cultivating freshwater pearls. He offered the patent to the state in exchange for 3,000 plåt and the right to name the next professor. The state promptly sold it to a jeweler for the same 3,000 plåt and demanded a share of the proceeds. In a classic “maybe next time” response, the Swedish government made Linnaeus a nobleman to reward him for selling the patent to the state. (A like and a share cost nothing, so why not?) Linnaeus was overjoyed at his rise in rank. From then on, the name Carl von Linnaeus rang across Europe.
Linnaeus in later life
There is little to say about Linnaeus’s later years. He was still poor and ill, still loved plants, and still had a troubled family life. (What a luckless man.) In 1778, the “Prince of Flowers” died, but disorder continued after his death. His will called for a simple burial and careful preservation of his specimens, while his wife remained as fond of ceremony as ever. Uppsala Cathedral was solemn and dignified; at the Linnaeus country home, everything was in chaos. Fortunately, his elder son Carl Linnaeus the Younger helped put the collections in order—only for Sara to sell them at a high price soon afterward.
Closing a biography of Linnaeus, the author was left with a rueful sense of how quickly worldly things pass. Before him, the naming of species followed no consistent rules: names could be long or obscure, and both duplicate names and multiple names for one organism were common. After him, the binomial system he promoted was clear and direct, and it benefited countless people. He came into the world empty-handed; he left it with only two small estates. The only technology that might have made him rich—freshwater pearl cultivation—was no longer his. His noble title could not pass to his son, and even his collection was sold to Britain after his death. Born into a pastor’s family, Linnaeus carried a certain religious cast: naked he came and naked he departed, as though only twinflower and chickweed wintergreen remained to prove he had existed. Compared with the hundred-krona note that eluded him, perhaps that was the mark he most wanted to leave.
*: This claim is disputed. The material on knighthood in the second paragraph came from the author’s adviser on European culture, Herr von Schnelltenberg. According to Wilfrid Blunt’s The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus, however, Linnaeus was already entitled to use von after becoming a Knight of the Order of the Polar Star. This article provisionally follows the former account.
The author wants to make a joke: read the full article, like it, and share it to raise your recruitment odds for these Operators: Suzuran, May, Myrtle, Vanilla, Absinthe, Hibiscus, and Vigna; Nightingale, Eunectes, Snowsant, and FEater; Mudrock, Flint, Asbestos, Beeswax, Platinum, and Myrrh.* The list comes from PTRS, with some information drawn from APG IV, the Flora of China database, and PTRS. Its overall order is plants, animals, and minerals. Standard Chinese names take priority, followed by common names. Within each group, entries are sorted by descending rarity; those of the same rarity follow the phylogenetic tree, with disputed entries last. Minerals are ordered by descending rarity. Linnaeus himself controls the size of the recruitment bonus. Whether Rosmontis returns depends on the old gentleman’s mood. This buff has nothing to do with Hypergryph and is pure superstition. In any case, may the grand master bless you all!
* A few less familiar names: Central Asian wormwood is commonly called absinthe wormwood, one of the ingredients in Vermouth (cross that out)—absinthe; the identity of “red bean” is disputed; “snow pheasant” is a common name for the white eared pheasant; and myrrh is the resin of a myrrh tree.
PS: This article previews a scientist cosplay and introduces Linnaeus’s background and history. For the first-hand cosplay photos, follow the official QQ account’s Qzone at 2681412751 (tap “Read the original”), or the author’s own Qzone at 305534565.
Images without credited sources were found online and will be removed upon request.
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