by What Linnaeus Saw- A Scientist's Quest to Name Every Living Thing (retail) (epub)
A page from Linnaeus’s own copy of his 1737 book Genera Plantarum, showing lines left blank and filled in with handwritten notes as new information arrived. He kept this copy on his shelf until he was ready to bring out a revised edition in 1742.
Linnaeus’s drawing of a bat with big ears and cartoony toes from 1727, when he was in high school. Bats were classified with the predatory animals at that time.
Linnaeus also moved the whale. Scientists had long thought these giant sea creatures were fish. Even though his knowledgeable friend, the late Peter Artedi, may have suspected otherwise, he too had classified them with the fish. No one knows when a sketch of a bottlenose whale was given to Linnaeus, or whether it influenced this change in classification. It depicted a stranded pregnant whale that had died on a beach at Fredrikshald, Norway, in November 1749. The unborn calf was found inside its mother’s body connected by an umbilical cord. If the whale hadn’t died, Linnaeus understood, she would have given birth to a live whale calf. Scientists were finally ready to accept that whales were mammals.
Another big change guaranteed Linnaeus’s place as a pioneer in science history. As he had done with plants five years earlier, he now gave consistent binomials, or two-word names, to every one of those four thousand animal species. We still use many of the names he coined, such as Elephas maximus (Asian elephant) and Canis lupus (gray wolf).
Linnaeus’s name for our species, Homo sapiens, meaning “wise human,” was not physically descriptive, and his full scientific definition of the species was unusually brief and cryptic: “Know yourself.” In this way, Linnaeus invited us to know ourselves as human animals and to understand our place in the natural world. He was also acknowledging that not every man is wise (sapiens), but should strive to achieve sapientia, the virtue of wisdom. He was convinced that our ability to reason and show wisdom distinguished our species from apes and any other “cousins of man.” Perhaps he hoped this would satisfy the theologians as well as his own religious concerns.
This watercolor sketch of a whale and her unborn calf is one of the earliest images of the species later determined to be a bottlenose whale. Painted by an unknown artist, it still hangs over the door of Linnaeus’s bedroom at Hammarby.
Along with the human species, Linnaeus placed the Simia, the apes and monkeys, in the class Primates. This innovation was daring and controversial because it rejected both the old hierarchy of the Chain of Being and the prevailing view of man as being separate and apart from the other animals. What did he really mean by this change? He was saying that apes and humans were different species, but physically similar—but he was not saying that humans and apes were “related” to each other. As far as Linnaeus knew, as far as anyone knew at the time, that was impossible.
Nonetheless, Linnaeus was still under fire. Swiss naturalist Albrecht von Haller mocked him for arrogantly thinking himself “a second Adam.” Welsh zoologist Thomas Pennant, a correspondent who generally admired Linnaeus’s botanical work, rejected his classification of man. “My vanity would not suffer me to rank mankind with apes, monkeys, maucaucos [lemurs], and bats,” he admitted in a letter.
Another critic took aim from Rome. Just as the tenth edition of Systema Naturae was published in 1758, Pope Clement XIII began his reign as leader of the worldwide Catholic Church. Clement ordered artists to apply paper fig leaves to the Vatican’s “indecent” classical statues and paint over nudes on the Sistine Chapel frescoes—and he forbade the use of Linnaeus’s books in the Vatican’s gardens. It is possible that he had been offended by terminology in Linnaeus’s so-called “sexual system” of plants. Or he may have seen the classification of man with the apes as an attack on the prevailing biblical view. Whatever Pope Clement’s reason was for the ban, the next pope lifted it in 1773 and even fired the director of Rome’s botanical garden for not knowing the Linnaean system.
Linnaeus assumed that there must be “cousins of man” somewhere in the world. He imagined that these separate living species would be classified in between humans and apes. In searching for other human species, the “cousins,” Linnaeus carefully followed the principles of science, as he understood them. “Nature does not proceed by leaps,” he often told his students. He wrote:
The absence of things not yet discovered has acted as a cause of the deficiencies of the natural method; but the acquisition of knowledge of more things will make it perfect; for nature makes no leaps.
Linnaeus thought that there would be more species to discover in the gaps, in both the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom.
When discussing plants, for example, he explained that groups of plants were like islands in a sea. One student drew this island map from his class notes. The circles were islands. They represented orders of plants. The bigger the circle, the more genera it contained. A circle’s location on the map showed how close, or similar, it was to other groups of plants, or how remote. Along the inside edges of neighboring circles, the student wrote the names of plants with similar closely related features, like palms and ferns.
A “genealogical/geographical map” of plants drawn by one of Linnaeus’s students from his class notes. Where some circles touched, he penned names of genera with traits similar to plants in the order next door. For instance, palms (Palmae) were linked with ferns (Filices). In this part of his drawing, the order of grasses (Gramina) is the largest and contains the most genera.
However, Linnaeus and his students didn’t believe that natural orders were “related” to each other by heredity. To Linnaeus, the white space—the “ocean” between the “islands”—represented gaps in his knowledge. Any missing species had simply not been found yet.
In the animal world, in particular, Linnaeus recognized that limited knowledge made it difficult to find the in-between species. He theorized that
. . . there are somewhere apes which are less hairy than man, erect in position, going just like him [man] on two feet, and recalling the human species by the use they make of their hands and feet, to such an extent, that the less educated travellers have given them out as a kind of man.
In the 1700s, Europeans knew little about the animals and people in far-off regions of the world. Linnaeus had to make use of the information available to him—colleagues’ letters, publications and reports of sailors and travelers. He waded through all their claims to judge whether they were true or false. Some stories turned out to be secondhand tales, others were wild exaggerations meant to impress the folks back home. Some unreliable reports confused chimpanzees, orangutans, baboons, and gibbons with one another and even with humans.
This illustration was published in England in Edward Tyson’s The Anatomy of a Pygmie. People debated whether this creature was a primitive sort of human and watched animals in captivity for signs of civility, such as table manners.
Linnaeus was led astray by travelers claiming to have seen humans who lived in caves and came out only at night. He named them Homo troglodytes, meaning cave-dweller, but we know now that these light-skinned children of dark-skinned parents were afflicted with a rare inherited disorder called albinism. Their pure white skin was easily sunburned, and their eyes were extremely sensitive to daylight.
He also was misled by a 1658 report by Jacob Bontius, physician to the Dutch settlement on the island of Java. Bontius described a live animal brought from Borneo. Called “ourang-outang” locally, Bontius gave it a Latin name, Homo sylvestris, meaning “man of the forest.”
VARIATIONS
Since Linnaeus had already divided some animal and plant species into subcategories called “varieties,” in 1758 he followed the pattern with humans. He identified four variations, which were geographically based: Americanus, Afer (meaning from Africa), Europaeus, and Asiaticus. A fifth variety, Monstrosus, was a catchall group for everything he was unsure of. This was the first serious scientific attempt to subdivide the human species.
In order to write the full scientific descriptions, however, he relied on the ancient theory of humors: red bl
ood, white phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. This provided an observable characteristic—color. The result was a racist and misguided linking of continent, skin color, and temperament. Especially problematic was the linking of color to temperament. These descriptions are offensive stereotypes and are not used today.
This is how he organized humans in 1735:
KINGDOM ORDER CLASS GENUS SPECIES VARIETY
Animalia Quadrupedia
(four-footed) Anthropomorpha
(humanlike) 1. Homo
(human) sapiens
(wise)
2. Simia
(ape)
3. Bradypus
(sloth)
And this was how he reorganized us in 1758:
Animalia Mammalia
(mammals) Primates
(primary) 1. Homo
(human) sapiens
(wise) 1. Americanus
2. Europaeus
3. Asiaticus
4. Africanus
5. Monstrosus
troglodytes
(cave-dwelling)
2. Simia
3. Lemur
4.Vespertilio
(bat)
All “varieties” of humans were one species: Homo sapiens.
In 1699, British physician Edward Tyson reused the name Homo sylvestris for another animal, even though he realized it was probably different from the one Bontius described. Tyson, dissecting the animal, compared its anatomy with those of the ape and the human and found it had more in common with the human than the ape, especially when it came to the brain. He concluded it was neither human nor ape, but something in between. People debated whether the creature was a primitive sort of human and watched for signs of civility, such as table manners. Not until 1929 was this species correctly identified as the pygmy chimpanzee.
Linnaeus also named a species of tailed man, Homo caudatus, based on a confused sailor’s misinterpretation of ceremonial clothing made of bark worn by people from the Nicobar Islands in the eastern Indian Ocean.
Although Linnaeus turned out to be wrong about troglodytes, sylvestris, and caudatus, scientists now know that other human species did exist but long ago became extinct. Since the nineteenth century, remains of more than a dozen extinct species of primitive or early-modern human ancestors have been found around the world. For example, in 2013, fossil remains of Homo naledi were discovered in South Africa. His bones suggest that he was a toolmaker who also climbed trees. Even though Homo naledi was related to our species, he was not our direct ancestor. However, scientists recently discovered in today’s human genome DNA from another “cousin” who lived in Siberia 50,000 years ago—proof that Homo neanderthalensis was our direct ancestor.
While Linnaeus taught new generations of students and worked on revising his “System of Nature,” the menagerie in the university’s botanic garden grew. Like the people of the province where he grew up, Linnaeus was thrifty. He was not inclined to purchase animals. Those he had were given as gifts by his traveling students, admirers around the world, and sea captains of the Swedish East India Company. Many came from the Swedish king and queen.
Raising animals was nothing new to Linnaeus. When he was a child, his father kept domesticated pigeons, horses, cows, and sheep. His brother Samuel, now a pastor, kept honeybees. As a university student, Carl had hung branches around his room, where some thirty species of birds, including larks and sparrows, found places to perch or nest. It is not known how his landlady felt about his feathered roommates.
Professor Linnaeus continued to observe the varying intelligence, temperaments, behaviors, and cleverness among many different species right there in Uppsala. Several monkeys—a Barbary macaque, a marmoset, a white-headed capuchin, and a tufted capuchin, as well as his favorite, the guenon monkey Diana—chattered from their special houses in the garden. North American raccoons, a guinea pig, a South American coati, a rodent called an agouti, and, from Madagascar, several kinds of lemurs—black and ring-tailed lemurs and a mongoose—roamed the flowerbeds or lived in the animal house by the orangery. Goldfish from China swam in a barrel, while parrots—a scarlet macaw, a blue-fronted amazon, and an African grey—squawked, whistled, and shrieked from the trees.
Some animals even lived with the family in their big yellow house. Sara Lisa had a full, busy household and a farm to oversee, five children to raise, live-in students to care for, other students tramping in and out for lectures, plus several servants and farmhands to supervise. She was often asked by the university to host parties. It was good that she was a capable organizer, but being married to Linnaeus was probably challenging. For instance, one evening he and a professor who’d arrived early to a party launched into a spirited debate. To clarify his point, Linnaeus grabbed a stick of wood char from the kitchen fire and wrote notes all over the clean kitchen floor.
Animal antics added to the already exuberant household. The African grey parrot was a talented mimic. One day an old gardener, known for blowing his nose loudly before work, entered the garden, and the parrot squawked a command, “Blow your nose!”
Occasionally a student would knock on the professor’s office door. “Step in!” came the reply. The student would be baffled to find the room empty except for the parrot.
During the family’s meals, the bird often sat on Linnaeus’s shoulder waiting for handouts. If lunch was late, the parrot reminded him, “Twelve o’clock, Mr. Carl!”
Elsewhere, a clever little monkey named Grinn was raising a ruckus at the royal court. With nimble fingers, the monkey, who was no bigger than a kitten, unfastened and stole the silver buckles from everyone’s shoes. The queen had had enough monkey trouble. She banished the cotton-top tamarin, along with his formal portrait, sending them as a “gift” to the only person she knew who would be excited to take him in. Professor Linnaeus welcomed the exiled New World monkey into his noisy menagerie.
Grinn was portrayed in oil on canvas by Gustav Hesselius for the king and queen. The peanut shell provides a size comparison.
In addition to the scientific hustle and bustle of Linnaeus’s house, his students benefited from the systems and tools he was developing. These made thinking about the natural world clearer, easier, faster. The next generation of scientists would build its own revolutionary ideas on the foundations that Linnaeus and his predecessors laid. They explored ideas that Linnaeus probably never imagined.
In 1809, French taxonomist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed a radical theory: that human beings actually had transformed, or evolved, from apes. Lamarck’s contemporary, Georges Cuvier, compared living animals with fossils and confirmed that entire species could die out, proving that extinction was a fact. Gone was the idea of a fixed number of unchanging species.
In the 1850s, British naturalist Charles Darwin looked back at the scientists who preceded him. He commented in a letter to the author of a new book about Aristotle, “Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in different ways, but they were mere school-boys compared to old Aristotle.” Darwin, whose grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had been a fan of Linnaeus, admired these three—Linnaeus, Cuvier, and Aristotle—for their ability to organize massive amounts of information so that it could be understood. Linnaeus was not only a precursor to Darwin, but a hero.
In 1872, Darwin wrote a letter to a French paleontologist:
I cannot at present give up my belief in the close relationship of Man to the higher Simiae [apes] . . . for I cannot believe that such resemblances can be due to any cause except close blood-relationship. That man is closely allied to the higher Simiae is shewn [sic] by the classification of Linnaeus, who was so good a judge of affinity.
In his groundbreaking 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, “Expressions such as that famous one by Linnaeus . . . that the characters do not make the genus, but that the genus gives the characters, seem to imply that some deeper bond is included in our classification than mere resemblance.”
The monkeys clowning around at Blue John’s, Diana’s mi
ld eyes, the buckle-stealing rascal Grinn, and even the African grey parrot’s squawky talk all showed Linnaeus examples of animal intelligence, some surprisingly human.
His view of man’s place in the animal kingdom did not follow Plato’s Great Chain, but it was not quite Darwin’s evolutionary thinking either. Scientific thought was inching forward. In classifying the apes near the humans, in recognizing the balance of nature and the battle for survival (the “war of all against all”), and in acknowledging that species could change (species are the work of time), Linnaeus became part of the bridge that guided science into the future.
Linnaeus’s legacy would be cemented by the next generation. A new wave of young scientists, brilliant and brave, went out to explore the world.
10
STUDENT EXPLORERS
A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discoverers are among them, as comets amongst the stars.
—CARL LINNAEUS, LETTER TO THE ROYAL SWEDISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES REQUESTING A SCHOLARSHIP FOR DANIEL ROLANDER, MARCH 12, 1752
Floorboards creaked at dawn across Uppsala as students and townies yawned and rolled out of bed. Every Wednesday or Saturday from April to July, they pulled on the required uniform—comfortable short jackets, baggy white sailor pants, broad-brimmed hats—grabbed their gear and headed out. They were about to embark on an exhilarating twelve-hour nature hike, led by the best naturalist in all of Sweden.
