Carl Linnaeus

Overview

Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist and physician who solved a practical problem that had blocked natural history: species had no stable names, so no two authors could be sure they were discussing the same organism. His answer was binomial nomenclature, a genus name followed by a species name, applied consistently across plants, animals, and minerals, together with a hierarchy of ranks from kingdom down to species. He believed species were fixed and separately created, so the hierarchy in his hands was a filing system rather than a claim about ancestry; a century later Darwin reinterpreted the same nesting as evidence of descent. Start with the introductory material to Systema Naturae rather than the catalogue itself, and read a modern account of the naming rules alongside it, since the system in use today has been much revised.

Where to start reading

• Systema Naturae 1735

  The first edition ran to eleven printed sheets and laid out the three-kingdom scheme and the rank hierarchy; it grew over twelve editions into the reference work that fixed animal naming.

• Species Plantarum 1753

  A catalogue of every plant species Linnaeus knew, and the work in which two-part naming was applied systematically for the first time; it remains the formal starting point for botanical nomenclature.

Part of

• Systematics and taxonomy

Sources

1. Carl Linnaeus Wikipedia
2. The Linnean Society of London The Linnean SocietyHolds Linnaeus's specimens, manuscripts, and library.
3. Binomial nomenclature Wikipedia