Species

82 Species

friend Sauvages that he was unable “to understand anything that is not systemati-

cally ordered,”^147 and he was obsessive in this regard. To this end, he established a

system that did impose that order on the living and nonliving world.

Linnaeus’ widely cited “denition” of species, repeated throughout his writings

in various wordings, is:

There are as many species as the diverse forms created in the beginning (Species tot

sunt numeramus, quot diversae formae in principio sunt creatae).^148

This is not really a denition, and is more of a statement of piety. However, in
1744 he was forced to allow that some species are the result of hybridization, at least
in plants, because (he thought) he observed it happening. A species of plant he placed
in a genus Peloria (from the Greek pelor, meaning monstrosity) was in stem and
leaf structure part of the Linaria genus, but the ower was clearly different.^149 This
admission was widely known by subsequent botanical writers.^150 Still, he thought
that genera were real and the possibilities for change limited. Per Larson, Linnaeus
imagined in the Fundamenta fructifications

that God created one species for each natural order of plants differing in habit and fruc-

tication from all others. These species, mutually fertile, gave birth to as many genera

as there were different parents, their fructication somewhat changed.^151

In the Pralectiones,^152 Linnaeus went further:

The principle being accepted that all species of one genus have arisen from one mother

through different fathers, it must be assumed:

1. That in the beginning the Creator created each natural order only with one
   plant with reproductive power.


2. That by their various mixings different plants have arisen which belong to
   the mother’s natural order as they are similar to the mother with regard to
   their fructications, and are, as it were, species of the order, that is, genera.


3. We may assume that plants have arisen within the orders, that is, by genera of
   one order, may mix with each other. In this way there will arise species that
   should be referred to the mother’s genus as her daughters.^153
   Linnaeus thus employed the Great Chain of Being in a rather unusual way. Most
   “chainists” accepted what was later called the Principle of Plenitude (the lex comple-
   tio), which stated that God would create everything that could be created, since he
   would not make an incomplete creation. This usually meant that species graded into
   each other in a series of varieties. Linnaeus instead represented species using the

(^147) Lindroth 1983, 23.
(^148) Fundamenta botanica No. 157, [Linné 1736, 18].
(^149) Hagberg 1952, 196f, Glass 1959.
(^150) For example, Lee 1810, Gray 1821.
(^151) Larson 1967, 317.
(^152) In 1744. A version may be found in Linné 1792 , 16 –18.
(^153) Quoted in Larson, loc. cit.