364 i Flora Unveiled
Linnaeus and the Search for the “Natural”
System of ClassificationNo one did more to publicize the sexual theory of plants in the latter half of the eighteenth
century than the Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, better known as Linnaeus. Linnaeus
achieved this feat not as an experimentalist like Camerarius, but as a taxonomist. His new
sexual system of plant classification, based on the number of stamens and pistils, swept
all others aside and dominated botany in Europe and the New World from around 1760
to 1800.
Linnaeus understood, better than anyone else, that the tsunami of new plant species that
was inundating Europe as a byproduct of the Age of Exploration had created an urgent need
for a uniform method of classifying and naming plants. He was the first botanist to break
with the ancient past and dispense with Theophrastus’s division of plants into the three
main categories: trees, shrubs, and herbs. Yet, in other respects, Linnaeus’s philosophical
underpinnings were antiquated, even to his contemporaries. More than a whiff of medi-
eval scholasticism permeated his efforts to reconcile the bewildering diversity of the Plant
Kingdom with Aristotelian principles and the accounts of the Creation given in Genesis.
The son of a Lutheran vicar in the rural Swedish village of Råshult, Linnaeus was strongly
influenced by seventeenth- century natural theology as articulated by the British naturalist
and Puritan divine John Ray. He was barely touched by the intellectual movements of the
Enlightenment, such as the rise of Deism, the new field of biblical criticism, and the grow-
ing evidence for the vastness of geological time suggested by the increasingly frequent dis-
coveries of fossils. Yet, to Linnaeus, the lack of a universal system for classifying and naming
plants posed a religious challenge as well as a scientific quandary. In a sense, Linnaeus was
engaging in his own brand of higher criticism from a botanical perspective. For, if the num-
ber of species was indeed fixed as was widely believed, how did the world’s vast flora squeeze
into the Garden of Eden? And was this even feasible, given the diversity of habitats required
to accommodate all the world’s flora?
Linnaeus passionately believed that he had been called upon by God to “reform” bot-
any.^36 Just as Luther had sought to eliminate the role of the clergy as divine intermediar-
ies, Linnaeus aimed to bring people closer to God by taking plant identification out of the
exclusive domain of professional botanists (himself excepted) and by making it accessible
to the lay public. God had given Adam the sacred task of naming all of His creatures, and
each name that Adam conferred was emblematic of that creature’s essential being and place
in the Creation. To know a plant’s true name was, in a very real sense, to bring one closer
to God.
Tragically, these “natural” names assigned by Adam, along with the Edenic Ur- language
itself, had been lost following the Fall and the Tower of Babel episode described in Genesis.
Natural historians of the seventeenth century, including Linnaeus’s predecessor John Ray,
believed that plant taxonomy was in a similar state of post- Babel confusion. God had cre-
ated living organisms according to a “natural order” arranged in a hierarchy, with plants
at the bottom and humans at the top, equivalent to Aristotle’s Scala Natura, and Adam
had assigned names that reflected the “natural” relations among the organisms. Although
Ray despaired of ever recovering prelapsarian knowledge of these natural relationships, he
sought to approximate it by grouping plants according to their anatomical features. He