Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything

Huge sums could be made with the right finds. John Lyon, an amateur botanist, spent two hard and dangerous years collecting specimens, but cleared almost $200,000 in today’s money for his efforts. Many, however, just did it for the love of botany. Nuttall gave most of what he found to the Liverpool Botanic Gardens. Eventually he became director of Harvard’s Botanic Garden and author of the encyclopedic Genera of North American Plants (which he not only wrote but also largely typeset).

And that was just plants. There was also all the fauna of the new worlds-kangaroos, kiwis, raccoons, bobcats, mosquitoes, and other curious forms beyond imagining. The volume of life on Earth was seemingly infinite, as Jonathan Swift noted in some famous lines:

So, naturalists observe, a flea

Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;

And these have smaller still to bite ’em;

And so proceed ad infinitum.

All this new information needed to be filed, ordered, and compared with what was known. The world was desperate for a workable system of classification. Fortunately there was a man in Sweden who stood ready to provide it.

His name was Carl Linné (later changed, with permission, to the more aristocratic von Linné), but he is remembered now by the Latinized form Carolus Linnaeus. He was born in 1707 in the village of Råshult in southern Sweden, the son of a poor but ambitious Lutheran curate, and was such a sluggish student that his exasperated father apprenticed him (or, by some accounts, nearly apprenticed him) to a cobbler. Appalled at the prospect of spending a lifetime banging tacks into leather, young Linné begged for another chance, which was granted, and he never thereafter wavered from academic distinction. He studied medicine in Sweden and Holland, though his passion became the natural world. In the early 1730s, still in his twenties, he began to produce catalogues of the world’s plant and animal species, using a system of his own devising, and gradually his fame grew.

Rarely has a man been more comfortable with his own greatness. He spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits of himself, declaring that there had never “been a greater botanist or zoologist,” and that his system of classification was “the greatest achievement in the realm of science.” Modestly he suggested that his gravestone should bear the inscription Princeps Botanicorum , “Prince of Botanists.” It was never wise to question his generous self-assessments. Those who did so were apt to find they had weeds named after them.

Linnaeus’s other striking quality was an abiding-at times, one might say, a feverish-preoccupation with sex. He was particularly struck by the similarity between certain bivalves and the female pudenda. To the parts of one species of clam he gave the names v ulva, labia, pubes, anus, and hymen. He grouped plants by the nature of their reproductive organs and endowed them with an arrestingly anthropomorphic amorousness. His descriptions of flowers and their behavior are full of references to “promiscuous intercourse,” “barren concubines,” and “the bridal bed.” In spring, he wrote in one oft-quoted passage:

Love comes even to the plants. Males and females . . . hold their nuptials . . . showing by their sexual organs which are males, which females. The flowers’ leaves serve as a bridal bed, which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity. When the bed has thus been made ready, then is the time for the bridegroom to embrace his beloved bride and surrender himself to her.

He named one genus of plants Clitoria. Not surprisingly, many people thought him strange. But his system of classification was irresistible. Before Linnaeus, plants were given names that were expansively descriptive. The common ground cherry was called Physalis amno ramosissime ramis angulosis glabris foliis dentoserratis. Linnaeus lopped it back to Physalis angulata , which name it still uses. The plant world was equally disordered by inconsistencies of naming. A botanist could not be sure if Rosa sylvestris alba cum rubore, folio glabro was the same plant that others called Rosa sylvestris inodora seu canina . Linnaeus solved the puzzlement by calling it simply Rosa canina . To make these excisions useful and agreeable to all required much more than simply being decisive. It required an instinct-a genius, in fact-for spotting the salient qualities of a species.

The Linnaean system is so well established that we can hardly imagine an alternative, but before Linnaeus, systems of classification were often highly whimsical. Animals might be categorized by whether they were wild or domesticated, terrestrial or aquatic, large or small, even whether they were thought handsome and noble or of no consequence. Buffon arranged his animals by their utility to man. Anatomical considerations barely came into it. Linnaeus made it his life’s work to rectify this deficiency by classifying all that was alive according to its physical attributes. Taxonomy-which is to say the science of classification-has never looked back.

It all took time, of course. The first edition of his great Systema Naturae in 1735 was just fourteen pages long. But it grew and grew until by the twelfth edition-the last that Linnaeus would live to see-it extended to three volumes and 2,300 pages. In the end he named or recorded some 13,000 species of plant and animal. Other works were more comprehensive-John Ray’s three-volume Historia Generalis Plantarum in England, completed a generation earlier, covered no fewer than 18,625 species of plants alone-but what Linnaeus had that no one else could touch were consistency, order, simplicity, and timeliness. Though his work dates from the 1730s, it didn’t become widely known in England until the 1760s, just in time to make Linnaeus a kind of father figure to British naturalists. Nowhere was his system embraced with greater enthusiasm (which is why, for one thing, the Linnaean Society has its home in London and not Stockholm).

Linnaeus was not flawless. He made room for mythical beasts and “monstrous humans” whose descriptions he gullibly accepted from seamen and other imaginative travelers. Among these were a wild man, Homo ferus , who walked on all fours and had not yet mastered the art of speech, and Homo caudatus , “man with a tail.” But then it was, as we should not forget, an altogether more credulous age. Even the great Joseph Banks took a keen and believing interest in a series of reported sightings of mermaids off the Scottish coast at the end of the eighteenth century. For the most part, however, Linnaeus’s lapses were offset by sound and often brilliant taxonomy. Among other accomplishments, he saw that whales belonged with cows, mice, and other common terrestrial animals in the order Quadrupedia (later changed to Mammalia), which no one had done before.

In the beginning, Linnaeus intended only to give each plant a genus name and a number- Convolvulus 1, Convolvulus 2, and so on-but soon realized that that was unsatisfactory and hit on the binomial arrangement that remains at the heart of the system to this day. The intention originally was to use the binomial system for everything-rocks, minerals, diseases, winds, whatever existed in nature. Not everyone embraced the system warmly. Many were disturbed by its tendency toward indelicacy, which was slightly ironic as before Linnaeus the common names of many plants and animals had been heartily vulgar. The dandelion was long popularly known as the “pissabed” because of its supposed diuretic properties, and other names in everyday use included mare’s fart, naked ladies, twitch-ballock, hound’s piss, open arse , and bum-towel . One or two of these earthy appellations may unwittingly survive in English yet. The “maidenhair” in maidenhair moss, for instance, does not refer to the hair on the maiden’s head. At all events, it had long been felt that the natural sciences would be appreciably dignified by a dose of classical renaming, so there was a certain dismay in discovering that the self-appointed Prince of Botany had sprinkled his texts with such designations as Clitoria, Fornicata, and Vulva.