Every year the 23rd of May marks the anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus, who had a greater impact on botany than almost any other man.
Born in southern Sweden, this son of a poor country parson became acquainted with plants at an early age. In fact, his father taught him the names of hundreds of them.
Through hard work and sheer determination, he became a professor of botany at the University of Uppsala.
There, he was a most successful and popular teacher, inspiring his pupils with his love of plants that many of them went to the ends of the world on botanical exploration.
His greatest work, though, was bringing order into the chaos of botany and zoology, which had arisen through each author using the names that seemed best to him.
Linnaeus’s System
Linnaeus, who had a genius for classification, invented a system by which plants could be neatly pigeon-holed and readily cataloged for reference.
Instead of the long-winded descriptive names used by most of his predecessors, he adopted (though he did not invent, as is often stated) and made invariable the use of two words only in the botanical name of a plant.
System of Classification
These are the familiar binomials, now universally used, the first word being the name of a genus, the second the name of the species within that genus.
Though his system of classification was soon out-moded, and his concepts of species and genus are not those of the modern botanist,
Linnaeus will always be honored for his impetus to the knowledge and scientific classification of plants and animals; the lie was one of the world’s great naturalists.
44659 by F. C. Coulter