The scientist Linnaeus - the decoder of nature

Carl von Linné -hay Linnaeus - is a great Swedish doctor and botanist. Considered as Darwin's most important predecessor, he is known for his work Systema naturae, a system of classification of plants, animals and minerals. This year, he was 300 years old.

Carl Linnaeus was born on May 23, 1707 in a small village called Råshult in southern Sweden. His father, Nils Linnaeus was a pastor. It was his father who passed on his love of plants.

Legend has it that the boy Carl had a love for trees and flowers in his mother's womb, because his mother was pregnant when she often looked at exotic and wonderful flowers in her husband's flower garden. Carl wrote about himself poetically when he was born: 'Only when spring enters its loveliest period and when the crowing of the chicken sounds summer coming ' - that's May. In the old days, Carl's cradle was combined with beautiful flowers with sweet scent.

As an elementary school student, Carl was considered a good botanist and Carl's teacher then advised his parents to let him pursue a doctor's career, instead of becoming a monk as they attended. (then botany is still a part of medicine).

(Photo: Linnaeus300.com)

Later, Carl attended medical school in Lund, southern Sweden. After studying for a year, Carl moved to Sweden's most prestigious and ancient university in Uppsala.

Infinite confidence and ambition to understand and classify things in its entirety - not only on the earth but also the universe - are the two main drivers of Carl's entire life and career. Because of this ambition, he was also called " Prince of Botany ". The world calls him ' Pliny of the North ' (Pliny is the greatest natural science historian of ancient times), ' Second Adam ' and many other names.

His work Systema naturae is a system of classification of plants, animals and minerals, like a society, including kingdoms, provinces, districts and tenants.

In this work, the criteria he used to classify plants were gender characteristics, discovered in the late 17th century but still not accepted everywhere. Nature, according to him, is proliferating. That is the way in which life exists in its diversity.

The cover page and the " sewing tree " from Örtaboken, Linnaeus' manuscript is known
earliest from 1725 (Photo: Linnaeus300.com)

For animals, he classifies them according to various criteria, such as four-legged animals, or mammalia - mammals, judged by the number and position of the mammal of an animal, in addition to other criteria. .

With minerals, similarly, he divided by external characteristics and not based on its chemical composition.

In this system, plants, animals and minerals are arranged as in an army organization with subordinates, and unlike Darwin, he puts the head in that hierarchy. as a gem in the crown of Creator. However, he was the first scientist of the time, in 1758, to come up with a strong and sensitive conclusion that humankind must be placed in the same order as orangutans, of the primates.

Systema naturae was first born with only 12 pages. Later, during the period of 1766 to 1768, Linnaeus developed its work to 2,300 pages with all 15,000 different species of plants and animals. Sorting and naming each one is a huge achievement and hard to understand. But Linnaeus understood that his work was only a small beginning. By the end of the 18th century, the estimated number of flora and fauna species on Earth was about 30-40 million different and most of those species would never be drawn or named.

There are many methods of classifying plants and animals of Linnaeus, methods based on the gender characteristics of plants, no longer applied by modern science. However, over the centuries, his classification system is extremely useful to be used as a scientific tool for drawing diagrams and understanding the natural world.

Carl Linnaeus died on January 10, 1778, leaving mankind with a modern and unique sense of order, a wild and ancient fantasy.

Readers can understand more about his people and career at: www.linnaeus300.com

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