by What Linnaeus Saw- A Scientist's Quest to Name Every Living Thing (retail) (epub)
At Nils’s direction, every morning any new pumpkin flower with thread-like filaments, called stamens, was carefully snapped off. Any flower containing a short stalk, or pistil, with a bulge at its base was left to bloom. Experience growing other vines with two types of flowers, such as cucumbers and melons, had taught Nils that only the flowers with little green bulges at their bases would ripen and mature into fruits. So it seemed reasonable to assume that removing the unwanted flowers would reduce competition for nutrients and cause the pumpkin plant to direct all its energy into the flowers with little green bulges.
An 1804 illustration showing cross-sections of two kinds of pumpkin flowers: on the left, with pistil and bulge, and on the right, with stamens fused together and no bulge.
Pumpkins were among the food plants important in Carl’s mother’s kitchen. His father’s goal was to present her with a harvest of big pumpkins. Day after day for the rest of the summer, skinny-stemmed pumpkin flowers were beheaded. However, by summer’s end, the garden revealed a puzzling result: no pumpkins. Not a single one.
It would be several years before Carl understood why his father’s pumpkin plants failed to make pumpkins that summer. Meanwhile, in September when the beech trees turned gold and days began to grow short, Carl had to leave once again. It had been nine summers since the day his parents first packed him off as a seven-year-old to the Växjö Cathedral School, to prepare him to follow his father into the clergy.
The thirty-mile trip took at least two days on horseback. The woods, the lake, the stony fields, and the garden with no pumpkins slipped into the distance as he made his way back to school alone.
A BRANCH OF THE FAMILY TREE
In the old Swedish name tradition, a child was given a first name plus a patronymic, which was derived from the father’s first name. So Linnaeus would have been known as Carl, the son of Nils, or Carl Nilsson. His sister would have been called Anna Maria Nilsdotter (Anna Maria, the daughter of Nils). In a tiny village like Stenbrohult, that was all they’d need.
Children born into families who could afford education required a formal school name, to distinguish them from classmates whose names and patronymics might be the same as their own. This applied only to boys, because in the early eighteenth century, girls were rarely given the opportunity to go to school.
School names were often based on birthplace or nature. For instance, when Carl Linnaeus’s father, Nils Ingemarsson, attended Lund University, he chose to call himself after a stately old linden tree on his family’s farm. He took the tree’s regional name, lin, added the Latinate ending -aeus, and became Nils Ingemarsson Linnaeus. Nils’s child Carl was Carl Nilsson Linnaeus. When Carl married Sara Lisa Moraea, she retained her name, as was the custom, but their children took their father’s last name, his daughters’ names ending in the feminine form, Linnaea.
When King Adolf Fredrik ennobled Carl Linnaeus in 1757 (it became official four years later), the professor adopted a new name: von Linné. Why he chose that name is not known, but it reflected the trend among the Swedish nobility toward all things French. Linnaeus provided a sketch upon which the royal herald based his coat of arms, designed to represent nature: “my little Linnaea in the helmet, with the shield divided into three fields: black, green, and red—the three kingdoms of Nature—superimposed on an egg.” However, there was a dispute. Linnaeus’s original sketch showed only the yellow yolk, and he was miffed when the royal herald misunderstood the symbolism and drew the entire egg.
Linnaeus made this sketch for his family coat of arms. The final design, created by the Swedish royal herald, is shown above.
Nearly three grueling years had passed since the summer of the failed pumpkins. Carl, now in the upper school at Växjö, was hiding an uncomfortable secret—he hated school. His grades proved it.
Every week of every year was the same routine—up before dawn for morning prayers and hymn singing, followed at 6 a.m. by classes, even on Saturdays. Every day four boys in four classes recited their lessons, shouting to be heard over one another, while their masters yelled corrections in a din of screaming, whipping, crying, and Latin practice. Teachers in those days were called masters; their students were disciples. “Brutal teachers used such brutal methods,” as Carl described it later; this was the accepted teaching method, meant to inspire him to learn.
On sunny days, though, what it inspired Carl to do was skip his studies to head for the fields and the thing he enjoyed most—hunting for interesting plants. Any boy who misbehaved or was absent was sent to cut birch branches into switches with which the schoolmasters would “teach” him his lessons. Carl paid for these days off. But a day in the field was worth it. It was a survival tool.
Carl’s notebook was probably a survival tool, too. Bound inside its soft blue and brown covers were 160 precious pages embossed with an Amsterdam watermark. A year ago, they’d been blank.
Now the pages were filling up, one plant per page, with no wasted space. At the top of each page he would write a plant’s common name in Swedish, then a scientific name in Latin or Greek. Next came the name’s origin, the plant’s uses, description, toxicity, and habitat. Sometimes he included lore about the plant—proverbs, or stories from the Bible or from Greek or Roman mythology.
Any entries too long for one page he continued upside down on a page with a shorter entry. Since he added plants as he found them in the fields or in books, they were in no particular order, a hodge-podge: coffee, tulip, common rue, basil, monkshood, daffodil, betony. So he made an alphabetical index, minutely written, on the back of his class schedule, which he folded and kept inside the notebook.
This side of the page from Carl’s high school notebook shows his daily class schedule (right of center), a list of alchemy symbols (far left), and the rest of the notebook’s index continued from the other side.
When the notebook was new, he’d written his formal school name with a flourish on the first page—Carolus N. Linnaeus—plus a few choice quotations from books by various authors:
If there is a single way towards health, it must be tested, even if it is dangerous.
The best medicines in the hands of an ignoramus are like a sword in the hands of a lunatic.
Many have not recovered because of too many remedies.
He copied directions for concocting herbal remedies—how to use lovage and cloudberries to fight scurvy, how to make blue ink from cornflowers and green ink from danewort (this entry he wrote in green ink, which remains green to this day). He included recipes to rid the human body of colic, stones, worms, even frogs.
Southernwood placed inside the pillowcase, he wrote, would get rid of fleas and lice. Parsnip was said to have special protective powers: “Anyone who smears himself with its sap will, without being harmed, be able to pick up a snake.” But beneath that he wrote himself a sharp warning: “Do not take the risk. This hot soup is not for me.”
Then, of course, there was the pumpkin. Cucurbita in Latin, pumpa in Swedish. Rub pumpkin leaves all over a horse, he wrote, and mosquitoes or gadflies will not bother it.
Carl was not struggling in all of his classes, just the ones crucial for graduation and his future as a clergyman: theology, ethics, rhetoric, oratory, Greek, and Hebrew. However, in all his academic misery, one bright spot emerged.
The local physician, Dr. Rothman, who had received a medical degree from the University of Harderwijk in Holland, was hired to teach a smattering of botany and medicine to Växjö’s crop of future Lutheran clergymen. The boys had to be prepared: in rural communities far from Sweden’s few doctors, parishioners desperate for medical help would turn to the best-educated person around—their pastor. These boys had a lot to learn.
Rothman’s medical garden demonstrations and field trips served up a smorgasbord of fascinating facts—basil eased heart palpitations; betony drove thick fluids from the head; black radish restored hair growth; borage reduced melancholy; nasturtium strengthened the memory and sharpened the mind. Carl took it all in, w
riting in his notebook. The doctor, seeing Carl’s enthusiasm, invited him to help in the garden where he grew plants to make ointments, tinctures, and salves to treat his patients.
In his student notebook, Carl drew a tree rooted in a checkerboard landscape like the fields, meadows, and woods back home.
Carl didn’t know how to tell his parents about his failing grades. His father, a poor country pastor, had sacrificed to scrape up the money for tuition, and his mother had made her expectations clear: Like it or not, he was to follow his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and uncles into the family business, the church.
Nils Linnaeus and Christina Brodersonia, Carl’s parents.
Carl didn’t want to disappoint his parents; he loved them. He didn’t know what he was meant to do, but he was sure life in the clergy wasn’t it. He believed in God deeply. But study Latin, Greek, theology, rhetoric? No thanks. Carl was painfully aware that he did not fit in. The natural world had a gravitational pull that he couldn’t resist. He wanted to be rambling through fields or slogging along the lake’s marshy edge—not kneeling at a bench with the other boys getting his knuckles whacked raw by the Latin master for every wrong answer. His church was the fields, the gardens, the woods. He saw evidence of God in these fascinatingly complex worlds, not in Latin class. He worried that his father wouldn’t understand. He knew his mother wouldn’t.
So there was bad news and there was worse news. The bad news Carl had known for a while—he was barely making it in high school. The worse news was that his father was destined to find out.
It happened in September 1726. His father was ill and traveled to Växjö to see the doctor of the province. When he arrived at the village, he headed first to the Cathedral School for a progress report from the headmaster. With Carl only a year away from entering university, Pastor Nils Linnaeus was expecting good news.
The headmaster did not mince words: Don’t waste your money, he said. Carl will never be a pastor or a scholar. Take him out of school immediately and apprentice him to a shoemaker or a tailor so he can learn a useful trade and earn a living.
The headmaster’s news did not help Nils feel any better.
But the doctor, Johan Rothman, who was also Carl’s teacher, disagreed with the headmaster’s assessment. He saw a spark in Carl that the other teachers had dismissed as unimportant from their Cathedral School perspective, and urged Nils to consider the medical profession for his son. The doctor felt so strongly about the boy’s abilities that he made the father an unbelievable offer: he would tutor Carl in botany and physiology, the study of how living organisms function, for free.
Nils took him up on the offer but, generous as it was, he knew this would not be good news at home. Handing down the parish from father to first son was tradition in Christina’s family and other families like hers. The church was a stable ladder to success and security, while medicine was a shaky, low-status profession.
For medical help, people had few options. Surgeons, physicians, and apothecaries had various kinds and amounts of training and skill. If a person needed a rotten tooth pulled or a broken bone set—or a haircut—he’d go to the shop with a red-and-white spiral pole out front, a sign of the trade of blood and bandages. There, the barber-surgeon would apply knife skills learned during his military experience sawing off limbs in battle. He could remove bladder stones, give a shave, or perform bloodletting to balance the body’s fluids, or “humors.”
A person with a heart, liver, brain, or stomach problem would go to a physician who treated illnesses with medicines, special diets, exercise, and therapeutic baths. A few, like Dr. Rothman, had an actual medical degree. People also called on apothecaries who collected, selected, and prepared medicines for healing. They sought out folk healers. It wasn’t easy being sick. It was even harder getting well.
Nils knew that his God-fearing wife, Christina, thought the church was the only acceptable option for their oldest son. She was not alone in looking down on medicine as an occupation. Considering the times, it would be easy to forgive her anxiety, especially if she knew the story of her own great-grandmother. Johanne Pedersdatter was a klok kone, a Norwegian term for a “wise woman” who knew how to use plants to heal the sick. The villagers claimed she’d murdered the bishop’s wife with black magic—in other words, that she was a witch. Her son, Christina’s grandfather, was only ten years old when his mother, who had been tortured into confessing, was burned at the stake in Stavanger, Norway, in 1622.
NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT THE FOUR HUMORS
In the first half of the eighteenth century, medical practice was still based on the theory, proposed by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (460–377 BC), that the body had four humors, or fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Blood was hot and moist; phlegm was cold and moist; yellow bile was hot and dry; black bile was cold and dry. These humors were considered to be the basis for people’s predominant moods, or temperaments (hence the phrase “being in a good humor” or “a bad humor”): the four temperaments were sanguine (optimistic, upbeat), phlegmatic (cool, unemotional), choleric (angry, hot-headed), or melancholic (sad). In a healthy person, each humor was balanced in the right proportion.
Galen, physician to the Roman emperors around 160 AD, added to the theory, assigning the qualities of hot, cold, moist and dry to diseases and the drugs to cure them.
Many old theories, like this one, persisted unchallenged because the Europeans revered the classical medical writers—Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen—and even the best medical schools used their writings as standard texts.
When Nils returned home, he didn’t mention any of Carl’s bad news to his wife. Several months later, he worked up the courage, and Christina burst into tears. “Is poor Carl to become nothing but a simple barber surgeon?” she cried.
Devastated, Christina’s hopes for a son in the church zeroed in on her second son. Eight-year-old Samuel, who loved plants too, was no longer allowed anywhere near his father’s garden.
In Växjö that fall, Dr. Rothman treated Carl like a son. He began teaching him to approach botany not as a hobby but as serious study. Since Carl preferred personal observation to abstract ideas, they worked to improve his organizational skills and memory by making tables, diagrams, and drawings. Dr. Rothman showed Carl how to organize his notes into rows and columns. These systematic arrangements provided visual memory aids and encouraged Carl to compare and evaluate information from different sources—and also saved expensive paper. Plus, when spread out on a single sheet, gaps, inconsistencies, and patterns all became easier to spot.
More modern, updated science now permeated Carl’s notebook. Still, he copied in some classic definitions, as if to prove wrong his mother’s skeptical view. One equated a physician who is also a philosopher with God himself. Carl underlined another, Julius Caesar’s description of what it takes to be a doctor:
a man learned, honest, mild, conscientious, mature, happy, who trusts in God, who is not puffed up by his knowledge, his labour or his success, who is not too fond of money.
Carl now knew exactly the future he wanted—“to be medicus and botanicus and nothing else.”
When he arrived home for Christmas vacation, Carl entertained his younger siblings by playing doctor to their imaginary wounds and illnesses. There were four of them now, ages sixteen to three—Anna Maria, Sophia Juliana, Samuel, and Emerentia. He took their pulses and, carving lancets out of wood, pretended to “bleed” them to balance their “humors.” He thrilled his brother and sisters by brewing up harmless herbal potions for their make-believe ailments. They all felt good . . . until the time came for Carl to return to school.
As spring turned green, so did his room in Växjö. But the more plant specimens he found, the more jumbled his collection became. The more jumbled his collection, the harder it was to track down specimens he knew he had. He couldn’t compare and contrast them if he couldn’t even find them. He needed to make sense of the chaos.
Dr. Rothman sug
gested sorting them into groups by their observable similarities. First, though, they had to select a trait to guide the organization. This dilemma had perplexed scientists for centuries. Everyone organized plants differently—some by color, some by shape of various parts, some by habitat, or alphabetically by name, or geographically, or by the plants’ medical, agricultural, or household uses.
Carl and his teacher chose the method devised by the celebrated French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, who had grouped plants into twenty-two “classes” according to the shapes of their flowers—bell, cup, cross, funnel and so on. Those classes were then broken down by their fruits into 698 subgroups. Tournefort chose the Latin word genus, meaning “type” or “kind,” to refer to each subgroup; the plural is genera. Each plant was placed first in a broad class and then in a more specific genus.
Carl made this copy of Tournefort’s chart of classes in his notebook as a guide for organizing his own collection of plant specimens.
That spring, Dr. Rothman, who tried his best from this remote part of Sweden to follow the news of scientific theories and innovations, wrote a summary in Swedish for Carl of a wildly controversial speech that discussed the structure of flowers. It had been given almost ten years earlier by a student of Tournefort’s, a French surgeon named Sébastien Vaillant, and had only recently been translated into Latin, the language in which Dr. Rothman read it.
