[Sigia-l] Monday birthday...

[Jody Hankinson]

>From the Writer's Almanac on NPR.... It seemed appropriate to this group.

It's the birthday of the man who gave us the system of classifying and
naming all the living things on the planet, Carolus Linnaeus, born in Råshult, Sweden (1707).

He was a botanist. He taught at universities. At a time when Sweden
was one of the poorest countries in Europe, Linnaeus set out to import
exotic plants and animals, hoping they could be raised for profit in
Sweden. He hoped to raise tea and coffee, ginger, coconuts, silkworms.
He experimented in clams.

It was at a time when people named plants and animals in many
different ways, usually based on what they looked like: Queen Anne's
lace, ghost orchid, and swordfish. But even within a single country, a
plant could be called by half a dozen different names by different
people, so Linnaeus decided to develop a naming system based in Latin.
He put each specimen into a large group called a genus and a smaller
subgroup called a species, and that became the binomial naming system,
which he published in 1758.

His botanical experiments failed. The tea plants died. The coffee
didn't make it in Sweden, and neither did ginger or coconuts or
cotton. Rhubarb did though, and Linnaeus, late in his life, said the
introduction of rhubarb to Sweden was his proudest achievement. But
today we remember him for his contribution to taxonomy.

When he published his taxonomy in 1758 he listed 4,400 species known
to science at the time. Today there are more than one and a half
million.