Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus)

Swedish physician and naturalist Carl Linné was born in 1707 near Stenbrohult, Smĺland. He began studying in Sweden, where being only a poor student, he always found patrons for his scientifical interests in nature. After an expedition to Lapland, he finished his studies in the Netherlands. There he first published his treatise "Systema naturae" using the latinized name "Linnaeus". It was released in 1735 and made him well known among Europe's botanists. Linné settled down in Stockholm in 1738. There he became a successful physician and continued to dedicate himself to natural science. In 1739, he was one of the founders of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. He became a professor in Uppsala in 1741. There he planted a great herbarium and established the museum of natural history. He also renewed the botanical garden, according to his systematics. Carl Linné was private physician of the royal family, a popular contemporary, and was raised to peerage in 1759. In 1779, he died as Carl von Linné in Uppsala.


Linné is the founder of modern biological systematics and the uniformly binary nomenclature, according to which every organism has one genus- and one species-name. In his "Systema naturae" of 1735, he developed a systematical classification of all plants within botanic. In later editions of this work he refined on the system and extended it on animals. These classifications are, in modified forms, still valid today. Since the times of the antiquity scientists had been using the sytematics developed by Aristotle. But expeditions in the 16th and 17th century had discovered a sheer endless increasing number of new species. Therefore, a very nonuniform system of naming was used in botany, often ending up in very long names. The new thing in Linné's system was his idea of hierarchically structuring the organisms according to similarities into regnum, classis, ordo, genus, species and varietas (= subspecies). The distinction between Linné on the one and Aristotle and others on the other side was that he did not divide the species by their habitats but according to morphological features. The base of his classifications in botany were the genitalia and the stamens and carpels of the plants.
Other works of Linné are "Genera plantarum" (1737), "Materia medica" (1749), "Philosophia botanica" (1751), "Species plantarium" (1753).

(A. Pashos, Translation: B. Gedrose & A. Pashos)