Linnaeus Canadensis

Carolus Linnaeus, the Enlightenment genius who classified the natural world, was a connoisseur of the north. As a youthful adventurer, he set off for Lapland, the far northern reaches of Scandinavia, where, he noted, the indigenous Sami people prepared reindeer milk eighteen different ways. Crossing into the Arctic Circle close to Sweden’s Jokkmokk region, he became one of the Arctic’s first serious scientific explorers. Although he suffered through clouds of gnats and times of hunger, he found the “savage wilderness” of Lapland entrancing, and he returned laden with rare plants. If summer was shorter there than anywhere else in the world, he wrote, it was “nowhere more delightful.”

Establishing himself in the university town of Uppsala, Linnaeus refused to be defeated by the remoteness of eighteenth-century Sweden. Instead, he made the world come to him. In his quest to name every animal and plant on Earth, he sent out seventeen “apostles” on collecting missions. His men explored Canada, accompanied Captain James Cook to the Pacific, and snuck into a closed Japan. While Linnaeus admired the diversity of tropical species, he took particular delight in the life forms of the north. He granted names to arctic and Canadian wildflowers, to the caribou (Rangifer tarandus), and to Odobenus rosmarus, better known as the walrus.

Three hundred years later, the world is still coming to Linnaeus. I joined the thousands who gathered last May in pastel pretty Uppsala to celebrate his tercentenary, captivated by a man who saw natural science as a form of adventure. In the eighteenth century, the world was new, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be shipped, packed, or carried back to Uppsala, where Linnaeus made order out of chaos.

As befits the enormity of Linnaeus’s fame in Sweden, his 300th birthday jubilee was a lavish affair. Along with Swedish royals, in attendance were Kofi Annan, Jane Goodall, and the Japanese emperor, who is an expert on goby fish. Around town, Peter Max-style banners declared Linnaeus “Mr. Flower Power.” To the Swedes, Linnaeus is an irresistibly romantic figure, key to their nationwide passion for nature. But as I would soon learn from Uppsala scholars, Linnaeus was a complex man, and anything but the dreamy flower power type.

Certainly, Linnaeus’s collecting trips demanded enormous personal sacrifice, and two of the northern ones went badly. Anton Rolandsson Martin reached the island of Spitsbergen with a whaling expedition in 1758, but he got ashore for only three days and made very few discoveries. Another apostle, Johan Peter Falck, committed suicide in Russia. All told, seven of Linnaeus’s apostles died in the field, succumbing to malaria and other misfortunes. Fortunately, the Canadian expedition had a happier ending.

For the North American trip, Linnaeus chose a former student, a botanist named Pehr (or Peter) Kalm. Linnaeus knew precisely what he wanted in a disciple, to the point of sounding coldly manipulative, and Kalm struck him as ideal, being of humble origins, sturdy, indifferent to food, and determined not to fail. “Now is the time,” Linnaeus wrote to members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, urging them to underwrite the North American expedition. “Another time he will be heavy footed, lazy, and comfortable, and too fat to run like a hunting dog in the forests.”

As his hardboiled imagery suggests, Linnaeus was no dry scientist. Instead, for all his erudition, his sensibility was humorous, even bawdy, and that was part of his brilliance as a teacher. Centuries before the computer, biologists praised Linnaeus as a master of information systems. He knew how to boil down complex facts into human terms, so they could be grasped and remembered.

Prior to Linnaeus, plants and animals had long, unwieldy names that scientists often changed at will. In 1753, Linnaeus revolutionized biology with his book Species Plantarum, which gave thousands of plants two-part Latin names. His brilliantly simple naming system would, within his lifetime, gain near universal acceptance, and it is still used today. Once established, Linnaeus expanded his system to animals, giving all life forms a first and last name just like people. Even non-scientists recognize certain of his Latin names, such as Homo sapiens and Cannabis sativa.

As the father of taxonomy — the classification of organisms — Linnaeus also established the hierarchy of the natural world, from kingdom down to species. And he invented an ingenious system of classifying plants that relied on a controversial memory aid: sex. Observing that a tulip has six stamens — the plant’s male reproductive organs — he declared the species a member of Hexandria, “six husbands in the same marriage.”

Beyond his wit, the true nature of Linnaeus’s character remains open to debate. One could argue, for example, about the meaning of a note Linnaeus wrote in 1751, frustrated that Pehr Kalm had not come to visit upon returning from North America: “Take burning firebrands and throw them at Professor Kalm, so that he might come without delay to Uppsala, for I long for him as a bride for the hour of one o’clock at night.” Was this Linnaeus the passionate (even homoerotic) teacher, longing to celebrate his student’s return to Sweden? Or was this Linnaeus the greedy manipulator, longing to get his hands on specimens of plants still unnamed?