Achievement

Many men and women deserve credit for moving human civilisation forward, for helping to cultivate the tree of knowledge, if you like. That being the case, it's almost invidious to pick out a greatest achiever or achievement. It would be akin to having to select a player of the match after a brilliant team display by Blackpool FC this afternoon. Nonetheless, I'm going to nominate Carl Linnaeus, as one worthy among many. His crowning achievement was to be the father of taxonomy. Sorry Hatshepsut, Aristotle, Euclid, Hippocrates, Pliny, Galileo, Newton, Merian, Darwin, Curie, Einstein et al. 

For those of you not familiar with Linnaeus, he only went and classified the natural world back in the 18th century.  "The first step in wisdom is to know the things themselves; this notion consists in having a true idea of the objects; objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate names. Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science." 

This classification, as outlined in 'Imperium Naturae' and 'Systema Naturae' is still the basis of the formal scientific naming system of animals, minerals and plants 300 years later. Good on him.

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)

Linnaeus, born in Sweden and educated at Lund and Uppsala universities, was a biologist and physician who not only became a Professor of both Medicine and Botany but who also spent much of his life collecting, discovering and classifying plants and animals. By the time of his death he was one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe, known variously as the Prince of Botanists, the "Pliny of the North" and one of the founders of modern ecology. 

From an early age he had a love of plants and the natural world. As a child he was given his own patch in his father's garden where he could grow flowers. At school he would bunk off and go exploring in the countryside looking for plants. As a student, at Lund and then Uppsala, he was lucky to have excellent mentors who encouraged his love of botany in particular.. 

the Linnaeus summer home at Hammarby near Uppsala

His greatest legacy is the system of classification that he developed and expounded in those seminal works of the mid-18th century, written in Latin as the international scientific language of the day. Linnaean taxonomy, his formal and rigorous multi-level system of naming things, soon superseded all previous attempts at codification. There are seven layers to Linnaean classification, applicable to all living things, and the sequence goes as follows: Kingdom - Phylum - Class - Order - Family - Genus - Species. (If you want a mnenonic by which to remember the sequence, I give you: kids prefer candy over fresh green salad.)

There are only five kingdoms: Animals (all multicellular living organisms), Plants (all green plants), Fungi (moulds, mushrooms, yeasts), Protists (amoeba etc) and Prokaryotes (bacteria and algae).

There are many phyla, including: Chordata (with backbones), Arthropods (jointed legs, exoskeletons) and Annelids (segmented worms).

Class is a subdivision of a phylum. For chordata, that might be: Mammals, Birds, Amphibians, Fish, Reptiles.

Within class there are orders. Within mammals are found such orders as: Carnivores and Primates.

Orders are further subdivided into families. The order of carnivores includes, among others, the families of: Canidae (dogs) and Felidae (cats).

Genus follows on from family. Felidae contains the likes of: Acinonyx (cheetahs etc), Panthera (lions and tigers etc), Neofelis (such as clouded leopard) and Felis (domestic cats).

Species is the lowest level of classification and, as you might have deduced from the paragraph above, divides a genus into specific animals (or plants or fungi etc). In my drill-down example, Panthera comprises just five species: Jaguar, Leopard, Lion, Snow Leopard and Tiger.

Because Linnaeus wrote in Latin, all seven divisions of any creature's full taxonomy are in Latin, and its binomial is always the genus and species. Accordingly, what we call a jaguar is termed Panthera onca and its full seven level classification is: Animalia - Chordata - Mammalia - Carnivora - Felidae - Panthera - Onca. Oh, the beauty of it.

What Linnaeus did for animals in the example above, he also did for plants.

frontispiece of Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, 1729

I don't know how far he got with his system of classification, whether fungi, protists and prokaryotes were afforded the same level of attention, but his methodology became universally accepted and scientists ever since have used it when discussing or writing about existing species, but also to categorise both 'new' species as they have been discovered in the last 300 hundred years, and to retrospectively categorise 'extinct' species as evidence about them  has come to light. That's quite some legacy, and a phenomenal achievement, I think you'll agree.

To conclude, a new poem from the imaginarium.

Shopping For Green Tea And Honey

Saturday market by the harbour wall

between rows of tamarisk trees,

sometimes referred to as salt cedars.

They shade the stalls in this island port.

Linnaeus, himself named after a lime tree,

devised the taxonomy by which this avenue

of tamarisks is known as Tamarix parviflora,

occasionally by its synonym Tamarix cretica.

I don't tell you any of this, you'd be bored.

Not much has essentially changed here

in centuries, except for tourists of course

and the euro usurping the oldest coinage.

I'm happily shopping for green tea and honey

but you're impatient to strip off, start tanning.

You'll burn, you always overdo it, won't be told.

We have two glorious weeks ahead. Go slow.

Camellia sinensis. loose leafed, weighed out

into a brown paper bag. And honey comes in

so many colours, depending on the varieties

of plants Cretan bees collected nectar from.

I prefer thyme honey, from Thymus capitatus.

Would you be interested to know that honey

is an excellent natural treatment for sunburn?

Green tea too. I'll save those facts for later. 

Thanks for reading, have a good week. S ;-)