LINNAEUS, CARL

(b. Södra Råshult, Småland, Sweden, 23 May 1707; d. Uppsala, Sweden, 10 January 1778),

botany, zoology, mineralogy, geology, medicine, economy. For the original article on Linnaeus see DSB, vol. 8.

As Sten Lindroth emphasizes right from the start of his DSB article, Linnaeus had few, if any, equals in reshaping the ways in which natural history was practiced in the eighteenth century. His literary output was prolific, and eighteenth-century reeditions (both authorized and pirated), translations, and popular adaptations of his main works—such as the Systema Naturae, the Genera Plan-tarum, and the Philosophia Botanica—number in the tens and hundreds. By the end of the century it was effectively impossible to be taken seriously as a naturalist without complying with the conventions of Linnaean taxonomy and nomenclature. Explaining this astonishing impact remains one of the main challenges for Linnaean scholarship, especially because Linnaeus’s work presents an amalgam of neo-Stoicism, scholastic reasoning, Cartesian iatromechanism, Baconian empiricism, Paracelsian natural philosophy, protestant physicotheology, and Scandinavian folklore that was surely hard to digest for his contemporaries. As Lindroth’s article amply demonstrates, Linnaeus was a highly idiosyncratic and syncretistic thinker, but also marginal by geographic origin and social standing, especially if compared with his life-long rival Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, superintendent of the Jardin du Roi in Paris and initiator and main author of the voluminous Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (44 vols., 1749–1804).

The reasons for Linnaeus’s success must therefore be sought in the wider cultural context of his time rather than in the force and authority of the ideas and arguments he put forward. Scholarship since the 1980s has done a lot to explore these contexts, focusing on three interrelated themes: Linnaeus’s role in transforming the culture of collecting that supported natural history; the economic agendas that motivated his reform of natural history; and the way in which his work resonated with eighteenth-century concerns with sexuality and human difference.

Collections and the Natural System . Linnaean scholarship has long suffered from a kind of inverse anachronism. Eager to reject the image of botany and zoology as mere “stamp collecting,” plant physiologists such as Julius von Sachs in the nineteenth century, as well as evolutionary biologists such as Arthur J. Cain and Ernst Mayr in the twentieth, made Linnaeus into a representative of a disciplinary past that was dominated by a mistaken “essential-ist” methodology. However, factual historical evidence supporting the view that Linnaeus “excelled in [scholastic] logic”—as Mayr put it in his influential The Growth of Biological Thought (1982, p. 173)—is scant, to say the

least. His school and university teachers shared the same eclecticism that Linnaeus himself later espoused, and the only authorities he ever quoted on methodological and epistemological issues were Francis Bacon and Herman Boerhaave. It was Linnaeus himself, moreover, who was the first to denounce classifications reached by division per genus et differentiam, including his own so-called sexual system, as artificial.

The aim of natural history, according to Linnaeus, was not to provide diagnostic tools but to uncover what he called the “natural system,” and he was clearly aware of the fact that this aim could not to be reached by a priori reasoning, but by empirical research alone. In natural history, such research included the acquisition of specimens through fieldwork or exchange with other naturalists, their accumulation in specialized institutions (botanical gardens and museums), and careful comparative work, as well as meticulous recording of data in catalogs, synoptic tables, and descriptions, cross-referenced by indices and stable names. Linnaeus’s key to success was the integration of such technologies with a system of social recognition that favored individualized contributions to a common agenda over grand theoretical designs. Acutely aware of the importance of collectors’ networks for the practice of natural history, Linnaeus specified rules of taxonomy and nomenclature—first in his Fundamenta Botanica (1736), and later in the Philosophia Botanica (1751), which amounted to a manual of do-it-yourself botany—that were explicit enough to allow every person capable of reading and writing to contribute to natural history (e.g., by publishing the description of a “new” species), yet afforded the authority and expertise of central institutions to synthesize the amassing data and clear competing claims of discovery and priority. Linnaeus himself disposed of a vast network of correspondents, including both metropolitan naturalists and peripheral amateurs, and for a time it became virtually impossible to lay claim on the discovery of a “new” species without having it sanctioned by Linnaeus.

The “natural system” has remained the focal research object of botanical and zoological taxonomy since Linnaeus. Not surprisingly, however, its meaning has changed considerably over time. For Linnaeus, “natural affinities” among organisms became manifest in two ways: first, by the constancy with which organisms reproduced their specific characters from one generation to the next; second, by the correlation of traits that allowed the naturalist to describe not only species, but also genera and units of higher taxonomic rank such as orders and classes. Both of these aspects were closely intertwined with the practical basis of Linnaean natural history. Linnaeus’s species concept shifted the emphasis from the observation of similarities to the observation of “laws of generation,” according to which certain characters proved “constant” in the transplantations specimens were undergoing when exchanged among naturalists. And Linnaeus’s concept of “natural” genera and orders established higher taxonomic units as research subjects, to be described and presented on their own, independent of any universally accepted method or system. The hybridization theory that Linnaeus developed in later years to account for the origin of species in time tried to unite both of these aspects. Species transformations and hybridizations between widely different species had been assumed possible since antiquity, but with Linnaeus they became the subject of an organized, collective research activity. In 1759 Linnaeus performed a hybridization experiment with Tragopogon pratensis (goatsbeard), which initiated a research tradition leading right up to Gregor Mendel’s famous experiments with peas.

Economy and Natural History . Linnaeus promoted reform not only in the international community of naturalists, to which he liked to refer as a “free republic,” but in his own home country as well, developing a distinct politico-economic agenda that built on a close connection between science, rational governance, and economic well-being. The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, which he cofounded in 1739, was initially called the Economic Society of Science, and the first volume of its Transactions contained a contribution by Linnaeus, in which he argued that natural history provided knowledge of natural resources, and thus one of the bases for the economic well-being of a nation. In a similar vein, the inaugural lecture Linnaeus gave in 1741, when assuming his professorship at Uppsala University, propagated “the necessity of traveling in one’s own country” (Oratio qua peregrinationum intra patriam asseritur necessitas, 1741), and Linnaeus’s surveys of various provinces of Sweden in the 1740s were carried out on behalf of the Manufacture and Trade Deputation of the National Estates. Linnaeus was also among those who called for obligatory education in economics for obtaining any university degree, and who promoted the installation of professorships in economics at Swedish universities during the 1740s. One of his own students, Pehr Kalm, was the first to be appointed to such a professorship at the University of Åbo (Turku, Finland) in 1747, shortly before he embarked on his three-year journey through North America.

Linnaeus’s engagement with economics was motivated by a peculiar mix of cameralist and mercantilist notions of economy. Linnaeus had close connections to members of the mercantilist, so-called Hat Party, which dominated Sweden during its so-called era of freedom (1718–1772), and he subscribed to the mercantilist view that a negative trade balance was detrimental to national economies. Import of exotic luxury goods such as tea, sugar, spices, or printed cotton led to a loss of bullion, and thus to a country’s economic decline. For Linnaeus, however, the solution to this problem did not lie in counter-balancing imports by exports, but in striving for the cameralist ideal of a rationalistically governed autarky, or economic self-sufficiency. “The idea was,” as Lisbet Koerner put it succinctly in her 1999 book Linnaeus: Nature and Nation, “to create a miniaturized mercantilist empire within the borders of the European state” (p. 188), either by identifying domestic natural resources that could supplant foreign imports, or by importing and “acclimatizing” exotic plants and animals for domestic use.

Natural history had an important role in this, as it provided an inventory of both domestic and exotic natural resources. University training in economics—combining natural history with the teaching of known uses of minerals, plants, and animals—could thus provide the state with a broad, disciplined basis of administrators, parsons, physicians, and engineers that furthered national prosperity through systematic allocation and exploitation of natural resources. Linnaeus’s own travels through his home country, and the questionnaires he published to obtain information, for example, on the calendar dates at which different species of trees came to leaf in different geographic regions in Sweden (Vernatio Arborum, 1753), betray this proto-statistical ambition. And also the worldwide travels that some of his students undertook, often with active support from the Royal Academy of Sciences and the Swedish East India Company, have to be seen in this context. Throughout his entire career Linnaeus tried desperately to get hold of exotic animals and plants, such as silkworms, rice, and tea, to cultivate them in Sweden, and developed grand designs to forest Lapland. Most of these projects failed, with two exceptions: Linnaeus introduced rhubarb to Sweden, and successfully seeded domestic mussels with pearls, for which he received, in 1761, enoblement, three thousand silver thalers, and the right to choose his own successor.

Sexuality, Anthropology, and the Politics of Nature . A key element of Linnaeus’s popular fame was without doubt his sexual system, first published in the Systema Naturae (1735). It was not only a handy, diagnostic tool for the identification of plants, but also made use of anthropomorphic metaphors in describing the sexual organs of plants. The result was a kind of ethnography of human sexuality, including adultery, polygamy, prostitution, incest, and homosexuality. Using these metaphors was, in part, surely meant to attract public attention, but also reflects the degree to which Linnaeus’s whole thinking was preoccupied with sexuality. The two substances of which all living beings consisted according to Linnaeus’s physiological teaching, “marrow” (medulla) and “bark” (cortex), were strongly gendered. The “marrow” was a substance passed on maternally, occupying the interior of organisms, and endowed with a tendency to grow and multiply. The “bark,” on the contrary, was a substance passed on paternally, enclosing and restraining the medulla, and endowed with the ability to protect and nourish it. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, Linnaeus was not a preformationist, but believed that organisms developed epigenetically through the antagonistic interaction of medulla and cortex. In many ways, this theory reflected Linnaeus’s own, strained relationship with his wife Sara Elisabeth Moraea, who bore him four daughters and a son and managed the “household,” which, at the height of Linnaeus’s career, consisted of three large rural estates.

Linnaeus’s tendency to naturalize social relations is prominent also in his anthropological work. The Systema Naturae of 1735 classified humans together with the apes and the sloth as Anthropomorpha, and subdivided humanity into four “varieties,” “white Europeans,” “red Americans,” “yellow Asians,” and “black Africans.” In later editions of the Systema Naturae, Linnaeus would supplement this classification by skin color with psychological criteria borrowed from the medical doctrine of the four temperaments. By contrast, Linnaeus portrayed the native inhabitants of Lapland, the Sami, as “noble savages” in his Flora Lapponica (1737). Anticipating Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), he described their way of life as a model of virtue and health, free of the corruptions that civilization, especially at courts and in cities, brought with it. This may in part explain the fact that postrevolutionary France indulged in a downright cult of Linnaeus and his science, resulting in the foundation of a great number of provincial Sociétés linnéennes in the early nineteenth century.

Both sexuality and human difference would become prominent themes in the Enlightenment. Their pronounced presence in Linnaeus’s work betrays the fact that he did not belong to an outdated tradition. He rather broke in many ways with traditional thought, especially with the idea of nature forming a scale of perfection on which each being was assigned its preordained place. Humankind’s place in nature, in Linnaeus’s eyes, was not at the top of the scala naturae, but rather in the center of a web of relations that interconnected all beings and was open to progress. The two Linnaean essays that propounded this view of nature, Oeconomia Naturae (1749) and Politia Naturae (1761), were then the ones also, whose legacy lasted well into the nineteenth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Editions of Linnaeus’s original publications abound, and there is no modern scholarly edition of his work. The best access to his work is still provided by B. H. Soulsby’s 1933 bibliography of Linnaeana in the holdings of the British Library (see Lindroth’s article for bibliographic detail). Wilfrid Blunt’s The Compleat Naturalist (see below) contains a useful overview of Linnaeus’s main works. The bibliographies by Sven-Erik Sandermann Olsen and R. W. Kiger et al. cover the two hundred dissertations completed under Linnaeus and present important biobibliographic information on his students. Linnaeus published in Latin and Swedish, but there exist translations into many different languages. The following list compiles English translations of his major works only, for other translations see Soulsby (1933).

WORKS BY LINNAEUS

Linnaeus’s Öland and Gotland Journey, 1741. Edited by William T. Stearn. Translated by Marie Åsberg. London: Academic Press for the Linnean Society of London, 1973.

Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Natural History, Husbandry, and Physick. Translated by Benjamin Stillingfleet. London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1759. A translation of select dissertations from the collection of theses and orations that Linnaeus had published under the title Ammoenitates academicae (Stockholm 1749–1769). Contains translations of Oratio qua peregrinationum intra patriam asseritur necessitas (1741), Oeconomia naturae (1749), and Vernatio arborum (1753).

The Families of Plants, with their Natural Characters, according to the Number, Figure, Situation, and proportion of all the parts of the Fructification. Translated by a Botanical Society at Lichfield. Lichfield: John Jackson, 1787. A translation of the posthumous seventh edition of the Genera plantarum (edited by J. J. Reichard, Frankfurt/M. 1778).

Select Dissertations from the Amoenitates Academicae. A Supplement to Mr. Stillingfleets’s Tracts relating to Natural History. Translated by F. J. Brand. London: G. Robinson & J. Robson, 1781. Contains translations of Curiositatis naturalis (1748), Telluris habitabilis incremento (1744), and Politia naturae (1761).

A General System of Nature, through the three grand kingdoms of Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals. 7 vols., translated by W. Turton. London: Lackington, Allen & Co., 1802–1806. A translation of the posthumous, thirteenth edition of the Systema naturae (edited by J. F. Gmelin, Leipzig, 1788–1793).

Nemesis Divina. Edited by Michael John Petry. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996. Translation of a secret diary Linnaeus kept to compile evidence for divine retaliation.

Lachesis Lapponica, or a Tour in Lapland. Edited by James Edward Smith, translated by Carl Troilius. London: White & Cochrane, 1811. This is the first edition of Linnaeus Lapland journal, which he himself never came to publish.

Linnaeus’ Philosophia botanica. Translated by Stephen Freer. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Musa Cliffortiana. Introduction by S. Müller-Wille; translated by Steven Freer. Koenigstein: Koeltz Scientific Publishers for International Association for Plant Taxonomy. In press.

OTHER SOURCES

Beretta, Marco. “The Société Linnéenne de Paris (1787–1827).” Svenska Linnésällskapets Årsskrift (1991): 151–175.

Blunt, Wilfrid. The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus. 2nd ed. London: Lincoln, 2001. Still the best biography of Linnaeus, with an updated bibliography.

Broberg, Gunnar, Allan Ellenius, and Bengt Jonsell. Linnaeus and His Garden. Uppsala: Swedish Linnaeus Society, 1983.

Drouin, Jean-Marc. “Linné et l´économie de la nature.” In Science, Techniques & Encyclopédies, edited by Denis Hue. Paris: Association Diderot, l’Éncyclopédisme & autres, 1991.

Duris, Pascal. Linné et la France, 1780–1850. Geneva: Droz, 1995.

Frängsmyr, Tore, ed. Linnaeus: The Man and His Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Contains translations of important contributions by Swedish scholars on Linnaeus: Sten Lindroth’s classic “The Two Faces of Linnaeus,” Gunnar Eriksson’s “Linnaeus the Botanist,” Frängsmyr’s “Linnaeus the Geologist,” and Gunnar Broberg’s “Homo Sapiens: Linnaeus’s Classification of Man.”

Gardiner, Brian G. “Linnaeus’s Medical Career.” The Linnean 1 (1984): 11–17.

———. “Linnaeus and Tobacco.” The Linnean 6 (1990): 15–20. Heller, John Lewis. Studies in Linnaean Method and

Nomenclature. Frankfurt: Lang, 1983. A collection of essays providing, among other things, a translation of the dedication to the Hortus Cliffortianus (1737), an interesting essay on the origins of binomial nomenclature in bibliographic practices, and expansions of the abbreviations Linnaeus used to refer to older taxonomic literature.

Hocquet, Thierry, ed. Les fondements de la botanique: Linné et la classification des plantes. Paris: Vuibert, 2005. A collection of essays by Giulio Barsanti, Pietro Corsi, Jean-Marc Drouin, Pascal Duris, and Staffan Müller-Wille. Also contains translations of the Fundamenta Botanica (1736) and the introduction to the Genera Plantarum (1737).

Hövel, Gerlinde. “Qualitates vegetabilium,” “vires medicamentorum,” und “oeconomicus usus plantarum” bei Carl von Linné (1707–1778): Erste Versuche einer zielgerichteten Forschung nach Arznei- und Nutzpflanzen auf wissenschaftlicher Grundlage. Stuttgart: Deutscher Apotheker-Verlag, 1999. An important study of Linnaeus’s pharmacological doctrine.

Jarvis, Charlie. Order out of Chaos: Linnaean Plant Names and Their Types. London: Linnean Society, 2007.

Kiger, Robert W., et al. Index to Scientific Names of Organisms Cited in the Linneaen Dissertations: Together with a Synoptic Bibliography of the Dissertations and a Concordance for Selected Editions. Pittsburgh: Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, 1999.

Koerner, Lisbet (née Rausing). Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. A detailed study of Linnaeus’s economic thought, his relation to Lapland, and the acclimatization projects he and his students undertook.

Lafuente, Antonio, and Nuria Valverde. “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics.” In Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, edited by Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Larson, James L. Interpreting Nature: The Science of Living Form from Linnaeus to Kant. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. An important study of the late-eighteenth-century legacy of Linnaeus, Buffon, and Albrecht von Haller.

Müller-Wille, Staffan. “Gardens of Paradise.” Endeavour 25, no. 2 (2001): 49–54.

———. “Joining Lapland and the Topinambes in Flourishing Holland: Center and Periphery in Linnaean Botany.” Science in Context 16 (2003): 461–488

———. “Nature as a Marketplace: The Political Economy of Linnaean Botany.” In Oeconomies in the Age of Newton, edited by Neil De Marchi and Margaret Schabas. History of Political Economy annual supplement, Vol. 35. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

———. “Walnuts at Hudson Bay, Coral Reefs in Gotland: The Colonialism of Linnaean Botany.” In Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, edited by Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

———. “Linnaeus’ Herbarium Cabinet: A Piece of Furniture and Its Function.” Endeavour 30, no. 2 (2006): 60–64.

———. “Collection and Collation: Theory and Practice of Linnaean Botany.” In Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38, no. 3 (2007). Provides an analysis and English translation (coauthored with K. Reeds) of the introduction to the Genera Plantarum (1737).

Natural History Museum (London). “Linnaeus Link.” Available from http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/projects/linnaeus-link/index.html. Collection of information on holdings of Linnaeana in museums worldwide.

Rausing, Lisbet. “Underwriting the Oeconomy: Linnaeus on Nature and Mind.” In Oeconomies in the Age of Newton, edited by Neil De Marchi and Margaret Schabas. History of Political Economy annual supplement, vol. 35. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Sandermann Olsen, Sven-Erik. Bibliographia discipuli Linnaei: Bibliographies of the 331 Pupils of Linnaeus. Copenhagen: Bibliotheca Linnaeana Danica, 1997.

Schiebinger, Londa. “The Private Life of Plants: Sexual Politics in Carl Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin.” In Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry, 1780–1945, edited by Marina Benjamin. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991.

———. “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in 18th-Century Natural History.” American Historical Review 98 (1993): 382–411.

Sloan, Phillip R. “The Buffon-Linnaeus Controversy.” Isis 67 (1976): 356–375.

———. “The Gaze of Natural History.” In Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, edited by Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. An important study of Linnaeus’s and Buffon’s anthropology.

Sörlin, Sverker. “Scientific Travel: The Linnaean Tradition.” In Science in Sweden: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1739–1989, edited by Tore Frängsmyr. Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1989.

———. “Ordering the World for Europe: Science as Intelligence and Information as Seen from the Northern Periphery.” In Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, edited by Roy MacLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. An interesting account of Linnaeus’s position in the world of eighteenth-century natural history.

Stevens, Peter F., and Steven P. Cullen. “Linnaeus, the Cortex-Medulla Theory, and the Key to His Understanding of Plant Form and Natural Relationships.” Journal of the Arnold Arboretum 71 (1990): 179–220.

Swedish Linnaean Society, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Uppsala University and its library, and the Linnean Society of London, with the collaboration of the Centre International d’Étude du XVIIIe Siècle. “The Linnaean Correspondence.” Available from http://linnaeus.c18.net/. An online edition of all preserved letters to and from Linnaeus, with explanatory notes and English summaries.

Weinstock, John, ed. Contemporary Perspectives on Linnaeus. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985. An essay collection with interesting contributions on Linnaeus and folk taxonomy, his classificatory practices, and his background in Swedish culture.

Staffan Müller-Wille