A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [179]
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