Carolus Linnaeus

I.) Background
A.) Childhood
i.) Birth
a.) Place: vilage of Rashult, in Sweden
b.) Date: May 23, 1707
c.) Parents: Nils Ingemarsson Linnaeus and Christina Bor
odersonia
ii.) Early Education
a.) He was taught Latin, religion, and geography by his
father at an early age.
b.) His father hired a tutor for him. After that, he ent
ered the Vaxjo Gymnasium in 1724, where he studied Greek, Hebrew, theology and m
athematics. One of his teachers, Rothman, offered to adopt Linnaeus to teach him
physiology and botany. His father accepted the offer.
B.) Higher Education
i.) University
a.) Rothman taught Linnaeus botany, especially how to cl
assify plants based on Tournefort's system, the system used before Linnaeus's.
b.) Professor Kilian Stobaeus offered him tutoring and l
odging, and allowed him to use his library which contained many books about bota
ny.
c.) Upon the advice of Rothman, Linnaeus attended Uppsal
a University because Rothman believed it would be beneficial for Linnaeus to st
udy medicine and botany at the same time.
II.) System of Classification / Taxonomy
A.) How it started
i.) He went to expeditions to observe different organisms.
B.) Method
i.) His system divided life into 2 kingdoms: plants, animals, an
d minerals. In addition to that, he establish five ranks, which are in descendin
g order: class, order, genus, species, and variety.
ii.) He established the binomial nomenclature system.
iii.) It gives each organism a name compose of two parts, which
are both mainly in Latin, but could use words from other languages.
iv.) The first part is the genus while the second part is the sp
ecies.
C.) Superiority to other systems
i.) Each species has a unique scientific name and each scientifi
c name corresponds to only one species. (i.e. there is a bijection between the o
rganisms and the scientific names).
ii.) The names are not very long and the naming is systematic.
III.) Publications
A.) Systema Naturae
i.) At that time, there were only 10000 species of organisms kno
wn, where around 3/5 are plants. In this book, he named around 7700 species of p
lants and 4400 species of animals.
ii.) This work continuously expanded from edition to edition. At
the first edition published in 1735, there were only 11 pages, while in the twe
lfth edition published in 1766 to 1768, there were 2400 pages.
iii.) There were also changes in the classification within editi
ons. For example, whales were originally classified as fishes, but were later cl
assified as mammals.
iv.) The Animal Kingdom was divided among 5 orders: Mammalia (ma
mmals), Aves (birds), Amphibia (amphibians, reptiles), Pisces (fishes), Insecta
(arthropods), and Vermes (remaining invertebrates, which were further divided in
to worms, molluscs, and hard-shelled organisms.

B.) Species Plantarum

i.) He placed every genus into an artificial class an order.
ii.) The classification system was based on the number of pistil
s and stamens.
C.) Genera Plantarum
i.) He divided the plant kingdom in 24 classes.