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 Linnaean taxonomy, his formal and rigorous multi-level system of naming things, soon superseded all previous attempts at codification.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 replacing 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 also. I'll save those facts for later. 

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

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Biorhythms

I was wandering through the undergrowth of the internet looking for details about Biorhythms that did not include balderdash regarding some pseudo-scientific nonsense when I came across a delightful idea that quite took my fancy.

Let’s start with some background. A circadian rhythm is a natural biological rhythm that regulates the sleep–wake cycle and repeats roughly every 24 hours. It can refer to any process that originates within an organism and responds to the environment. These 24-hour rhythms are driven by a circadian clock and they have been widely observed in plants, animals and fungi.

The first circadian cycle was observed in the 18th century in the movement of plant leaves by the French scientist Jean-Jacques d'Ortous de Mairan. Since then scientists have established that most organisms inherit the innate ability to keep track of time on a 24-hour scale. We know that birds use their biological clock during migration to help compensate for the changing position of the sun throughout the day. Chipmunks use their biological clock to properly time foraging so as to avoid predation (really?). We know about jet lag and we know that plants open at different times of the day.

Before I come to the point about plants there is this:
Electric fields may play a role in flowering. Apparently a blossom carries a negative charge, while an insect in flight holds a positive charge. I had no idea.

Now for the actual point. In 1751 Swedish botanist and naturalist Carl Linnaeus noticed that certain plants opened at different times. I would just have made a note about it; but it was Linnaeus and he noted that there were three categories. The meteorici open and close with the weather. The tropici follow the changing hours of daylight. And the aequinoctales, Linnaeus wrote, “open precisely at a certain hour of the day and generally shut up every day at a determinate hour.”

Can you spot where we’re going on this? He then went on to use certain species of flowering plants to design A Flower Clock. How brilliant is that?

He designed the clock by arranging the selected species in a circular pattern that indicated the time of day by the flowers that were open at each given hour. For example, among members of the daisy family, he used the hawk's beard plant which opened its flowers at 6:30 am and the hawkbit which did not open its flowers until 7 am.

Okay, so you wouldn’t want to use this method of telling the time to catch the 09.17 to Birmingham New Street but if that’s not a problem here’s a guide.

Flower opening times:
5:00 am: Poppy
6:00 am: Bindweed
7:00 am: Coltsfoot
8:00 am: Cowslip
9:00 am: Daisy
10:00 am: Sorrel
11:00 am: Common sow-thistle
12:00 pm: Iceplant

Flower closing times:
2:00 pm: Chicory
3:00 pm: Pumpkin
4:00 pm: Coltsfoot
4:00 pm: Sorrel
5:00 pm: Water lily
6:00 pm: Poppy
9:00 pm: Cowslip

I’d better finish there as I need to get this in the post before half past water lily. (Acknowledgements to: Gardena Flowers, Science Direct, NCBI and others.)

A bit of a talking to

The thing is (I said)
is that I think you need
to get a bit of a grip

look at yourselves
heads scrunched together
hidden in these woodlands
year after year
as if you’re ashamed
of being seen in simple white

and that’s the point
(raising voice slightly)
those summer plants are
just plain gaudy
a touch of frost and they’re off

you’re better than that
you should be proud
not in a boastful way (I added)
but I’ve seen you
fighting your way through snow
living off the land
not needing supplies
Napoleon couldn’t do that

So this time next year
it’s shoulders back and chins up
(I gave a demonstration)
you’d better be out of here.

After: The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives The Flower

First published in Dear Dylan, Poems after Dylan Thomas Anthology, Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2021.

Thanks for reading, Terry.

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