LINNAEUS, CAROLUS

( (Latin), ) born May 23, 1707, Rshult, Smland, Swed. died Jan. 10, 1778, Uppsala also called Carl Linnaeus, Swedish Carl Von Linn Swedish botanist and explorer who was the first to frame principles for defining genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them. Linnaeus was the son of a curate. His love of flowers developed at an early age; when only eight years old he was nicknamed the little botanist. He studied at the universities of Lund and Uppsala and received his degree in medicine from the latter. At Uppsala he met the veteran botanist Olof Celsius, who had a profound influence on Linnaeus' subsequent career. Linnaeus was appointed lecturer in botany in 1730 and two years later conducted explorations in Lapland for the Uppsala Academy of Sciences. The results of his journey were published in Amsterdam in 1737 as the Flora Lapponica and in English by Sir J.E. Smith as Lachesis Lapponica (1811). His reputation was firmly established by this work and, even more, by the appearance in 1735 of his Systema Naturae and of the Genera Plantarum two years later (the Species Plantarum was not published until 1753). For purposes of nomenclature of flowering plants and ferns, the first edition of the Species Plantarum has been internationally agreed upon as the starting point, together with the fifth edition of the Genera Plantarum, published in 1754. The Systema Naturae, which Linnaeus had shown to the botanist Jan Fredrik Gronovius in manuscript, so impressed Gronovius that he published it at his own expense. Linnaeus' system was based mainly on flower parts, which tend to remain unchanged during the course of evolution. Although artificial, as Linnaeus himself recognized, such a system had the supreme merit of enabling students rapidly to place a plant in a named category. It came into use at a period when the richness of the world's vegetation was being discovered at a rate that outstripped more leisurely methods of investigation. So successful was his method in practice that its very ease of application proved to be the greatest obstacle to its replacement by the more natural systems that superseded it. In 1736 Linnaeus visited England, where he met the botanist and physician Sir Hans Sloane in London and Johann Jakob Dillenius, the first professor of botany at Oxford. He returned to Holland to complete his work on the famous Hortus Cliffortianus and in Paris visited the three Jussieu brothers, distinguished botanists with whom he established a close friendship. Soon afterward, he went once again to Sweden, and in 1738 he settled in Stockholm as a practicing physician, a profession in which he attained considerable success. In 1739 he married Sara Moraea, the daughter of a physician. Two years after his marriage he was appointed to the chair of medicine at Uppsala, but a year later he exchanged this for the chair of botany, his true calling. An inveterate classifier, he not only systematized the plant and animal kingdoms but even classified the mineral kingdom and drew up a treatise on the kinds of diseases known in his day. His later years were taken up by teaching and the preparation of other works: Flora Suecica (1745) and Fauna Suecica (1746); two volumes of observations made during journeys in Sweden, Vstgta resa (1747) and Sknska resa (1751); Hortus Upsaliensis (1748); his Philosophia Botanica (1751); and the important Species Plantarum (1753), in which the specific names are fully set forth. In 1755 he declined an invitation from the King of Spain to settle in that country with a liberal salary and full liberty of conscience. In 1761 he was granted a Swedish patent of nobility, antedated to 1757, from which time he was styled Carl von Linn. An apoplectic attack in 1774 left him greatly weakened, and he died four years later. The Linnaean manuscripts, and his herbarium and collections of insects and shells, purchased by Sir J.E. Smith in 1783, are carefully preserved by the Linnean Society at Burlington House, London. Sir Edward James Salisbury Additional reading The most comprehensive work on Linnaeus is T.M. Fries, Linn, Lefnadsteckning, 2 vol. in 11 parts (1903; Linnaeus, 1923), including a selective but extensive bibliography. Other studies recommended are: B.D. Jackson, Linnaeus (1923); Wilfred Blunt, The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus (1971); and James L. Larson, Reason and Experience: The Representation of Natural Order in the Work of Carl von Linn (1971).