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Carolus Linnaeus

© Beverly Eschberger

Carl Linne was born in Stenbrohult, a province in southern Sweden May 23rd, 1707. His father was a Lutheran minister, and his parents hoped that Carl would also be drawn to the church. They were very disappointed when Carl showed neither the interest nor the aptitude for priesthood, but were somewhat consoled when he entered the University of Lund in 1727 to study medicine.

In 1728, Linne transfered to the University of Uppsala, the most prestigious university in Sweden. Unfortunately, its medical facilities had been terribly neglected, and Linne spent much of his time there collecting and studying plants to improve the botany facilities. (At the time, botany was a very important subject for medical students to study. Most of the medicines that doctors prescribed were derived from plants, and a doctor needed to be able to prescribe and prepare drugs directly from the plant. It was especially important that a doctor be able to recognize the correct plant, and to not use a potentially dangerous plant in his mixture.)

Linne had a life-long interest in botany. It was a hobby of his father's, and his father encouraged the interest in young Linne. Interestingly, before Carl was born, Sweden was undergoing a change from the traditional way of giving people last names based on their father's first name. Traditionally, if your name was John, and your father's name was Peter, you would be known as John Peterson or John, son of Peter. The new way of naming allowed people to choose their new family names. Linne's father chose Linne from the Swedish word "linn", which refers to the linden tree.

Linne finished his medical degree in 1735 in Holland. That same year, he published the first edition of a classification system of living things called the Systema Naturae or "the system of nature". At this time, all scientific books were written in Latin. It was a language which people all over the world still studied, so writing in Latin made it possible for scholar's everywhere to read Linne's book. Because he was writing in Latin, Linne Latinized his name to Carolus Linnaeus, and that is the name that he is best known by today.

Before Linnaeus, the last person to really make a concertrated effort at naming and classifying living things was Aristotle (384 to 322 BCE), and his system had prevailed for almost 2,000 years. Linnaeus developed the binomial or "two name" system (often referred to as the "Linnaean System") of naming organisms with genus and species names. He also developed a "filing system" for grouping species into a nierarchy of increasingly general categories: the Kingdom, Class, Order, Genus, and species--Family and Phylum were added later. Linnaeus is often called the "father of taxonomy", taxonomy is the branch of biology that is concerned with naming and classifying the diverse forms of life.