being little more than a pamphlet, this paper
included a new method of identifying flowering
plants, based upon their reproductive organs. It also
proposed a new hierarchical system for classifying
rocks, animals and plants, based upon shared
diagnostic characteristics. This encompassed the
now familiar concept of classes, orders, genera and
species and came to be referred to as Linnaean
taxonomy (although Linnaeus no doubt benefited
from the earlier work of eminent scientist Georg
Rumphius).
His reputation enhanced, in 1735 Linnaeus accepted
a position as personal physician to George Clifford,
a director of the Dutch East India Company, which
also entailed supervising an extensive botanical
garden. In this capacity he published several
important botanical texts. In 1738 he returned to
Sweden, where he continued to practise medicine,
and in 1741 he became Professor of Medicine at
Uppsala University, although he quickly assumed
responsibility for the biological sciences. In the
ensuing years he organised a number of expeditions
within the country and maintained a prolific output
of writing; refining his system for classifying plants and
describing hundreds of new species. However, the development
of binomial nomenclature was undoubtedly his most notable
achievement.
In the world in which Linnaeus grew up, men of science used a
system of polynomial nomenclature, in which organisms were
identified by a generic name accompanied by a descriptive
phrase in Latin, which could become quite a mouthful. For
example, Catnip went by the scientific name of Nepeta floribus
interrupte spicatus pendunculatis, which translates as ‘Nepeta
with flowers in an interrupted pedunculated spike’. There were
several obvious disadvantages to this system. First, if you only
had a couple of similar organisms to distinguish between, you
could do so quite succinctly, but where a larger number of
species were involved, the names could become unwieldy and
difficult to remember or reproduce. Furthermore, the descrip-
tions could be ambiguous and differ depending on the characters
chosen by the individual author, imbuing a dangerous lack of
consistency. In the late 16 th and early 17 th centuries, noted Swiss