Biography of Linnaeus

He was born on May 23, 1707, at Stenbrohult, in the province of Småland in southern Sweden.
His father, Nils Ingemarsson Linnaeus, was both an avid gardener and a Lutheran pastor, and
Carl showed a deep love of plants and a fascination with their names from a very early age. Carl
disappointed his parents by showing neither aptitude nor desire for the priesthood, but his family
was somewhat consoled when Linnaeus entered the University of Lund in 1727 to study
medicine. A year later, he transferred to the University of Uppsala, the most prestigious
university in Sweden. However, its medical facilities had been neglected and had fallen into
disrepair. Most of Linaeus's time at Uppsala was spent collecting and studying plants, his true
love. At the time, training in botany was part of the medical curriculum, for every doctor had to
prepare and prescribe drugs derived from medicinal plants. Despite being in hard financial
straits, Linnaeus mounted a botanical and ethnographical expedition to Lapland in 1731 (the
portrait above shows Linnaeus as a young man, wearing a version of the traditional Lapp
costume and holding a shaman's drum). In 1734 he mounted another expedition to central
Sweden.

Linnaeus went to the Netherlands in 1735, promptly finished his medical degree at the
University of Harderwijk, and then enrolled in the University of Leiden for further studies. That
same year, he published the first edition of his classification of living things, the Systema
Naturae. During these years, he met or corresponded with Europe's great botanists, and
continued to develop his classification scheme. Returning to Sweden in 1738, he practiced
medicine (specializing in the treatment of syphilis) and lectured in Stockholm before being
awarded a professorship at Uppsala in 1741. At Uppsala, he restored the University's botanical
garden (arranging the plants according to his system of classification), made three more
expeditions to various parts of Sweden, and inspired a generation of students. He was
instrumental in arranging to have his students sent out on trade and exploration voyages to all
parts of the world: nineteen of Linnaeus's students went out on these voyages of discovery.
Perhaps his most famous student, Daniel Solander, was the naturalist on Captain James Cook's
first round-the-world voyage, and brought back the first plant collections from Australia and the
South Pacific to Europe. Anders Sparrman, another of Linnaeus's students, was a botanist on
Cook's second voyage. Another student, Pehr Kalm, traveled in the northeastern American
colonies for three years studying American plants. Yet another, Carl Peter Thunberg, was the
first Western naturalist to visit Japan in over a century; he not only studied the flora of Japan, but
taught Western medicine to Japanese practicioners. Still others of his students traveled to South
America, southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Many died on their travels.

Linnaeus continued to revise his Systema Naturae, which grew from a slim pamphlet to a
multivolume work, as his concepts were modified and as more and more plant and animal
specimens were sent to him from every corner of the globe. (The image at right shows his
scientific description of the human species from the ninth edition of Systema Naturae. At the
time he referred to humanity as Homo diurnis, or "man of the day". Click on the image to see an
enlargement.) Linnaeus was also deeply involved with ways to make the Swedish economy more
self-sufficient and less dependent on foreign trade, either by acclimatizing valuable plants to
grow in Sweden, or by finding native substitutes. Unfortunately, Linnaeus's attempts to grow
cacao, coffee, tea, bananas, rice, and mulberries proved unsuccessful in Sweden's cold climate.
His attempts to boost the economy (and to prevent the famines that still struck Sweden at the
time) by finding native Swedish plants that could be used as tea, coffee, flour, and fodder were
also not generally successful. He still found time to practice medicine, eventually becoming
personal physician to the Swedish royal family. In 1758 he bought the manor estate of
Hammarby, outside Uppsala, where he built a small museum for his extensive personal
collections. In 1761 he was granted nobility, and became Carl von Linné. His later years were
marked by increasing depression and pessimism. Lingering on for several years after suffering
what was probably a series of mild strokes in 1774, he died in 1778. His son, also named Carl,
succeeded to his professorship at Uppsala, but never was noteworthy as a botanist. When Carl
the Younger died five years later with no heirs, his mother and sisters sold the elder Linnaeus's

library, manuscripts, and natural history collections to the English natural historian Sir James
Edward Smith, who founded the Linnean Society of London to take care of them.

This somewhat bold description Linnaeus wrote about plants with nine stamens and one pistil.
Those plants were referred to one of the classes in Linnaeus sexual system, the new classification
of the plant kingdom. Already as a student Linnaeus gave guided tours in the botanical garden at
Uppsala University. As part of the tour he was to present different classification systems, but
Linnaeus was not satisfied with the systems of the time. They were based on, for example, the
shape of the petals or whether the plant was a tree or a herb.

After having read a book about the sexual life of flowers he reached the conclusion that the
stamens and styles must be the most important characters for classifying the plants.

Linnaeus worked through the plants and formed a system where the plants were divided into 24
classes. The 24th consisted of the plants without flowers, the cryptogams. The sexual system was
first presented in Linnaeus' famous production Systema Naturae from 1735. It was Linnaeus'
goal to include all plants known from the whole world in his sexual system.

The European botanists did not at first accept Linnaeus' system since it was so totally different
from those known to them. Many were also shocked by his comparison with the human
sexuality. However, they soon realised how practical it was and the sexual system became a
great success. People could easily find out to what class a plant belonged just by counting the
stamens.

Despite the great response to the sexual system it soon became outdated since it was an artificial
system. Ever since the starting point of the evolution theory scientists do their utmost to find a
natural system that mirrors the relationship and development of the species.