58 Fun Facts About Carl Linnaeus

In which language did Linnaeus write the scientific names he gave to plants and animals?

Latin was the shared language of Europe's scholars in the 1700s, and Linnaeus wrote many of his own books in it; the names still take Latin form even when built from Greek words or a person's surname.

Which naming system did Linnaeus formalise for organisms?

Binomial nomenclature replaced unwieldy descriptive phrases: the briar rose, once labelled with a whole string of words, became simply Rosa canina. Others had tried two-word names before, but he was the first to use them consistently.

Linnaeus is popularly known as the father of which discipline?

Modern taxonomy still runs on his nested ranks, from kingdom down to species, though later biologists slotted in extra levels such as phylum and family that his scheme did not have.

What name did Linnaeus take after his ennoblement in 1761?

Carl von Linné was the style granted by a patent of nobility issued in 1761 but backdated to 1757, the year the king had first awarded him the honour.

What abbreviation marks Linnaeus as the authority for a plant name?

L. after a plant name, as in Rubus L. for the brambles, records that Linnaeus was the first to publish it; zoologists cite him differently, usually writing his surname out in full.

What was the profession of Linnaeus's father, Nils?

A Lutheran curate and keen gardener, Nils gave Carl a plot of his own by the age of five. The family expected another clergyman and was disappointed when the boy showed no taste for the priesthood.

The family surname Linnæus honours which kind of plant?

A lime (linden), lind in the family's own tongue, stood huge on their farm, and Nils made a scholar's surname of it when he went off to study for the church. An uncle had already taken the name Tiliander from the same tree.

Linnaeus's teachers advised his father to apprentice the plant-mad schoolboy to a tailor or to which other trade?

Cobbler or tailor, they said in 1726, judging him unfit for a learned education. A local physician changed his father's mind by predicting the boy would distinguish himself in medicine.

At which university did Linnaeus first enrol, in 1727?

Lund held him for a single year, in which the physician Kilian Stobæus took him into his home and encouraged his natural history. In 1728 he transferred to Uppsala, where he spent most of his career.

Which flower did Linnaeus name after the Uppsala professor who let him lecture as a student?

Rudbeckia, the black-eyed Susans, honours Olof Rudbeck the Younger and his father. Rudbeck chose the second-year student to give his botany lectures in 1730, then took him in as tutor to his children.

Linnaeus sorted flowering plants into classes and orders by which feature?

Number of stamens and pistils fixed each plant's class and order. One critic, Johann Siegesbeck, called this 'sexual system' loathsome harlotry, and Linnaeus gave his name to a small weed.

Which region did the young Linnaeus explore on horseback and on foot in the summer of 1732?

Lapland became his calling card: he took a Sami costume and drum to Holland, wore them in the homes of scholars, and posed in the outfit for a full-length portrait.

Which small woodland plant was Linnaeus's favourite and now carries his name as Linnaea borealis?

Twinflower was named Linnaea in his honour by the Dutch botanist Gronovius, and he made it his emblem: he holds a sprig in the portraits printed in his books, and it forms the crest of his arms.

Which naturalist's grandfather turned Linnaeus's plant system into a popular poem, 'The Loves of the Plants'?

Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, a physician, had already helped translate Linnaeus into English with his Lichfield botanical society before he put the system into verse in 1789.

What struck Uppsala in 1766, prompting Linnaeus to build a stone museum for his collections at Hammarby?

A great fire destroyed about a third of Uppsala, so Linnaeus moved his plants and books out of town to a small stone building on the hill behind his summer farm.

On his way to the Netherlands in 1735, in which city did Linnaeus expose a famous seven-headed hydra as a fake?

Hamburg's prized hydra was weasel jawbones dressed in snakeskin, Linnaeus announced, and the fuss was such that a friendly doctor advised him to leave town at once.

Before moving on to Leiden in 1735, Linnaeus collected a quick medical doctorate at which small Dutch university?

Harderwijk was the fast, cheap choice for students who had to take their doctorates abroad: Linnaeus arrived with his thesis already written and was examined and graduated within about a week.

Which disease did Linnaeus's doctoral thesis wrongly blame on clay?

Malaria, then called ague, was caused by clay, he argued in a thesis he brought to his examiners already written. The real carrier, the mosquito, was only identified in 1897.

How did Linnaeus's friend Peter Artedi die in 1735?

Drowned in an Amsterdam canal while walking home at night, Artedi left his life's work in manuscript. Linnaeus, true to a pact the two had made as students, edited and published it in 1738.

In the first edition of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus placed whales in which class?

Fish was the usual view at the time, and Linnaeus followed his friend Peter Artedi, the pioneer of fish classification. Only in 1758 did he take whales out of the class.

About how many pages long was the first edition of Systema Naturae, printed in 1735?

12 by one count, 11 or 14 by others: huge folio pages that set out his whole scheme of nature in tables. As specimens arrived from every corner of the globe, it swelled into a work of several volumes.

Which tropical plant flowered at George Clifford's Dutch estate in 1736, while Linnaeus was in charge of the garden?

Banana, then known as the plantain tree, bloomed at the banker's Hartekamp estate, and Linnaeus devoted a whole book to the event, Musa Cliffortiana.

Which garden did Linnaeus visit on his 1736 trip to England to meet its keeper, Philip Miller?

Chelsea Physic Garden's keeper sent him back to Holland with rare plants for his patron's collection, one prize of a summer trip that also took him to Oxford.

Which genus of tropical pitcher plants did Linnaeus name after the grief-banishing drug in Homer's Odyssey?

Nepenthes, 'without grief', is what Helen slips into the wine in the Odyssey. Linnaeus borrowed the word in 1737 for a pitcher plant in his catalogue of George Clifford's garden.

Heading home in 1738, never to leave Sweden again, Linnaeus stopped to visit botanists in which country?

France: in Paris he called on the Jussieu brothers, botanists at the royal garden, before sailing home from Rouen. From then on the wider world came to him, in the specimens his students shipped back from their voyages.

Which learned society did Linnaeus help found in 1739, serving as its first president?

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences founders drew lots for the chair and Linnaeus won, presiding for its first quarter. The first paper in its proceedings was his too, on the art of gardening.

In which copper-mining town did Linnaeus court and marry Sara Elisabeth Moræa, the local physician's daughter?

Falun's physician agreed to the match in 1735 but the penniless student had to wait: the wedding came in June 1739, once a salaried post in Stockholm gave him an income.

Which temperature scale is Linnaeus credited with turning upside down into its modern form?

Celsius set his scale in 1742 with water boiling at 0 and freezing at 100. Linnaeus had it reversed for a thermometer in his greenhouses soon after the astronomer's death, as others did independently.

Which relative did Linnaeus arrange to succeed him in his professor's chair at Uppsala?

His son Carl was groomed as successor from 1763 and took over the chair in 1777. He died six years later without heirs, and his mother sold the great collections abroad.

Linnaeus's pupil Daniel Solander sailed round the world as a naturalist from 1768 under which explorer?

James Cook's naturalists included Solander because he was already on the spot: Linnaeus had sent him to England in 1760 to spread the new system, and he stayed on at the British Museum.

Linnaeus's pupil Carl Peter Thunberg gathered plants while confined to the tiny trading island of Dejima in which country?

Japan kept foreigners penned on the island, so Thunberg, the trading post's surgeon, swapped medical knowledge with the Nagasaki interpreters for plants. He reached home in 1779, a year after Linnaeus died.

Which North American landmark did Linnaeus's pupil Pehr Kalm visit in 1750 and describe in print?

Niagara Falls capped two and a half years of collecting from Pennsylvania to Canada. Linnaeus repaid the seeds and pressed plants Kalm brought back by naming the mountain laurels Kalmia after him.

Which 1753 work by Linnaeus is the starting point of modern botanical nomenclature?

Species Plantarum is where the names botanists use today begin: no plant name printed before it counts, however long it had been in use.

Which medical subject did Linnaeus sort into classes and genera, as he had plants?

Diseases got their own classes and genera in his Genera Morborum of 1763, for arranging things was a passion with him. He adapted the scheme from his friend Sauvages, a doctor in Montpellier.

Which order of knighthood made Linnaeus the first man of science among its knights?

Order of the Polar Star knighthoods had not gone to a scholar before. Linnaeus wore the insignia from then on, and had himself shown in it for the portrait in his later books.

What object sits at the centre of Linnaeus's noble coat of arms?

An egg sits there because Linnaeus held that all life comes from one. For the crest above the shield he chose a sprig of the little woodland flower that bears his name.

Which ancient poem supplied Linnaeus's motto 'Famam extendere factis'?

The Aeneid's line runs: every life is short and cannot be recalled, but to extend one's fame by deeds is the task of valour. Linnaeus took it as his motto when he was knighted and headed his diary with it.

Which class name did Linnaeus coin in 1758, in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae?

Mammalia names the class for its milk glands, from the word mamma, so it could hold whales and bats beside horses and humans, which no label based on feet or habitat could do.

Before he coined Primates in 1758, under which heading had Linnaeus grouped humans with apes and monkeys?

Anthropomorpha, 'man-shaped', also held the sloths. When critics protested, Linnaeus asked them to name one feature that set man apart from ape by the rules of natural history, and said he knew of none.

Linnaeus's Systema Naturae sorted nature into three kingdoms: animals, plants and which other?

Minerals were no afterthought: as a student Linnaeus earned money teaching how to assay ores, and his stone kingdom got classes, orders and genera just like the two living ones.

Which everyday office item is Linnaeus credited with inventing to keep up with the flood of new species?

The index card let him shuffle new discoveries into place, which bound notebooks could not. He took to small paper slips in the 1760s, though historians allow he may not have been their only inventor.

What did Linnaeus popularise to denote male and female within species?

Mars and Venus signs, the old planetary symbols, began as his shorthand for male and female flowers. A third sign, Mercury's, marked blooms that were both at once.

To which city abroad were Linnaeus's plants, insects and books shipped after a medical student bought them in 1784?

London is where the buyer, James Edward Smith, founded the Linnean Society in 1788. After his death the society raised a subscription to buy the collections for itself, and it holds them still.

Where was Linnaeus buried in January 1778?

Uppsala Cathedral, in the town where he died, became the family's resting place: his widow had the stone cut for her husband, their son and herself.

In Scania, Linnaeus scouted sites for walnut trees, which the army wanted for what?

Gunstocks of walnut and whitebeam were one item on a long list: the government sent Linnaeus through the provinces to find home-grown substitutes for costly imports.

Which philosopher wrote of Linnaeus, 'I know no greater man on Earth'?

Goethe said only Shakespeare and Spinoza had influenced him more, and Strindberg called Linnaeus a poet who happened to become a naturalist.

Which country's ambassador asked Linnaeus for a botanist and was sent a favourite pupil, who died exploring South America?

Spain got Pehr Löfling, who sent plants home for about two years before sailing for South America in 1754. When he died there in 1756, Linnaeus turned his letters into a book in his memory.

Which plant from China reached Linnaeus alive in 1763, after he advised a sea captain to sow the seeds on board?

Tea had died on every earlier attempt. Sown in earth as the ship left China, the seeds sprouted at sea, but his hope of raising the crop at home to end a costly import came to nothing in the northern cold.

What was Linnaeus sent to find growing on Öland and Gotland in 1741?

Dye and drug plants were on parliament's list, beside clay for porcelain, because it wanted home-grown goods in place of imports. He came back with about a hundred plants never before recorded in the country.

Linnaeus proposed a garden 'clock' in 1751 that would tell the hour by what?

Flowers opening and closing on schedule, each species at its own hour, would mark the time. Linnaeus drew up the list of plants hour by hour and counted the clock among his own inventions.

In 1747 Linnaeus was named archiater, a title of honour that made him what to the royal family?

Chief physician to the king: by his own account the honour came in January 1747 without his asking. He kept his chair at Uppsala and went on teaching medicine and botany.

Which custom of wealthy mothers did Linnaeus's 1752 dissertation Nutrix Noverca campaign against?

The use of wet nurses was the target. The thesis, defended by a medical student, gathered every argument for mothers nursing their own babies and blamed hired milk for children's illnesses.

What name did Linnaeus give the favourite pupils he sent on voyages around the world, several of whom never returned?

Apostles was his own word for them. The first to go, the pastor Christopher Tärnström, was bound for China but got no further than an island off Vietnam, where he died in 1746.

In a private notebook of moral lessons, Linnaeus recorded real cases of wrongdoers overtaken by what?

Divine vengeance was his theme: the manuscript, Nemesis Divina, lists the ill fates of people who had misbehaved or crossed him, as warnings for the next generation of his family. It was printed only long after his death.

In Stockholm in 1739, a patron found Linnaeus a salaried post as physician to which service?

The navy post came through Count Tessin after a lean start: by Linnaeus's own account, the people of Stockholm would not at first trust him even with their dogs.

What did Queen Lovisa Ulrika bring Linnaeus to Drottningholm Palace to do in the 1750s?

Catalogue her collections: the queen's cabinet was rich in shells, insects and corals, and Linnaeus described it piece by piece, as he then did the king's at Ulriksdal.

Linnaeus's search for home-grown substitutes for costly imports followed which economic doctrine of his age?

Mercantilism, in the state-run form called cameralism, held that a country grows rich by making what it would otherwise import. Linnaeus backed tariffs and tried to raise rice, coffee and silk mulberries at home.

Linnaeus University was formed in 2010 when colleges in which two cities of his home province merged?

Växjö and Kalmar lie in Småland, where he was born. Växjö is also where his schoolmasters once advised his father to take the boy out of school and apprentice him to a trade.