Carolus Linnaeus 1707 - 1778 (Part 3) Young Carl von Linne was a lover of plants and wildlife, as was his father, a Lutheran minister, and avid gardener. His father hoped young Carl would go into the ministry, but it was evident the boy was a born naturalist. Though he eventually pursued a medical career, and both practiced and taught medicine as a professional, Carl’s heart was forever drawn to the natural world. He has been described as a workaholic with a mania for organization. He loved learning, reading and knowledge, and was also ruggedly strong and physically fit. It would take those qualities to take on a project of classifying every plant and animal on earth! Others before him had shared this passion. John Ray, the English naturalist who had died two years before Linnaeus birth, was a like-minded naturalist, who, by the way, was also a Christian and a creationist. But the universal classification scheme using Latin binomial nomenclature was the innovation Linnaeus brought to the discipline. He chose Latin because it was not only the universal language of science, but being a dead language, it was stable and unchanging. It provided a universal scheme that all naturalists in all countries could use to communicate with each other, as well as to publish their discoveries and cross-check their findings against those of others. At age 40, Carl latinized his own name into Carolus Linnaeus the name by which he is best known. He moved to Holland in 1735 for three years, then back to Sweden, where he lived out his days as a doctor and professor. Taxonomy remained his obsessive hobby throughout his life. Linnaeus at first actually believed it possible to classify every living thing in the world. At age 25, Carl secured a grant from the University of Upssala to take a thousand mile tour of Lapland to catalog plants. One can only imagine the delights and dangers, the fatigue and satisfaction this “creation safari” entailed as he waded icy streams, slogged through bogs and avoided nervous landowners. He kept detailed journals and catalogued thousands of plants. A similar trip through central Sweden added many more. Linnaeus traveled over four thousand miles on foot in his quest to catalog all the species in “God’s garden.” He also leveraged his talent to students that he motivated, who often went on long and arduous journeys to far lands to collect more specimens (Dan Graves said a third of these died on their dangerous treks). Linnaeus continued updating, expanding and improving his catalogs throughout his life, and as a legacy, he left the Linnaean Society, which continues to this day as an international taxonomic institution.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 19:34:06 +0000
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