BOTANY

Carolus Linnaeus was born in the small town of South Rashult. His love for flowers was developed at a very young age. At the age of only eight years old he had earned the nickname “the little botanist”. He studied at Lund and at Uppsala, from which he received his degree in medicine. At Uppsala he met the veteran botanist Olof Celsius, an event that had a profound influence on his career. He was then appointed lecturer in botany in 1730 and two years later conducted explorations in Lapland for the Uppsala Academy of Sciences. Results of his journey were then published in Amsterdam in 1737 as the Flora Laponica and in English Sir J.E. Smith as Lachesis Laponica. His reputation was firmly established by this work and even more by the appearance in1735 his Systema Naturae and of the Genera Plantarum two years later. The Systema Naturae, which Linnaeus had shown to the botanist Jan Fredrik Gronovius in manuscript. He was so impressed that he published at his own expense. This based mainly on flower parts. Although artificial, as he recognized, such a system had the supreme merit of enabling students rapidly to place a plant in a named category, and that at a period when the richness of the world’s vegetation was being discovered at a rate that outstripped more leisurely methods of investigation. His methods were so successful in practice that its facile application was the greatest obstacle to its replacement by the natural systems that superseded it. Then in 1736 he visited England where he met the botanist and physician Sir Hans Sloane in London and Johann Jakob Dillenius, the first professor of botany at Oxford. In 1738 he settled in Stockholm as a practicing physician. In 1739 he married Sara Moraea, the daughter of a physician. Two years after his marriage he was appointed to the chair of medicine at Uppsala but a year later exchanged this for the chair of botany, his true calling.