We began with the plants. Linnaeus pressed each one carefully, described it and gave it a scientific name, and then stored it away. Later, these were parcelled up, so each plant is now a brown paper package tied up with green string, each one stacked upon another. We unwrapped one package and, inside, we found the type specimen for Delphinium. Two hundred and fifty years after Linnaeus named it Delphinium (after the Latin for ‘dolphin’, because of the shape its flower makes as it opens, like a dolphin leaping out of the waves), it is still a vivid blue colour because it has been kept in storage, out of the light. This is just one in his library of thousands of plants.
We also unwrapped what was for Linnaeus a very special flower, Linnaea borealis, which was named after him and became his signature flower. If ever you see a painting of him, look for the flower. He usually has it draped through his fingers. When alive, it is pink, and its delicate petals carpet the floor of woodland in Sweden. At night, the pink burns in the darkness. The type specimen in the archive has turned brown over the centuries, unlike the delphinium. Pink and red flowers lose their vibrancy more quickly than blue and yellow ones.
Scientific names aren’t just for scientists. They tell stories. Buttercups are in the Ranunculus genus. They often grow near water and ranunculus is the Late Latin word for ‘little frog’, a species also found near the water. Water lilies are in the genus Nymphaea, after the water nymphs in Greek myths. The laurel Kalmia was named by Linnaeus for his Swedish student Pehr Kalm; the black mangrove Avicennia he named for the Persian physician Avicenna. He also reused classical names: Acer (maples), Quercus (oaks). The only plant Linnaeus named after a female body part is a blue vine popularly called a ‘butterfly pea’; he gave it the genus Clitoria. If you look up your favourite plant, it is bound to have a good story hiding in its scientific name.
The same goes for animals. Some animals Linnaeus named descriptively, like the southern flying squirrel, Glaucomys volans (‘the white mouse that flies’); in others, he added things that made him smile. He named the blue whale – the largest animal that has ever lived on earth – Balaenoptera musculus. In Latin, musculus means ‘little mouse’. He named the house mouse at the same time: Mus musculus. There are no mammals in the basement room of the Linnean Society – though some do still survive in Sweden – but there are a lot of fish pressed on to paper, their skin flattened as if they were flowers, as well as corals, shells and insects.
There is also, in among them, a little box that contains pearls made by Linnaeus. They are the first artificial pearls ever cultured in a mollusc. He made the pearls by jamming a piece of limestone into a freshwater mussel, Unio pictorum (the ‘painter’s mussel’, so called because artists would use the shallow valves to mix their pigment), and holding it there so the mussel would create a pearl around it. Then he put the mussel back into the river for six years, giving the pearl time to grow.
The pearls are small and roundish, apart from one elongated brown one that looks like it went a bit wrong. One has been cut in half, so I could see the irritant he put inside it to make the mussel form the pearl. It looks like a seed in the middle of the pearl.
Linnaeus sold his secret in 1762 to a Swedish merchant called Peter Bagge who got a permit from the king to make pearls, but even though he paid 6,000 dalars (more than £93,000 today) for a monopoly on the right to make pearls, he never got around to making any. Linnaeus once said that he wished he’d become famous for creating these pearls rather than for classifying nature. After taking a good look, we put them back in their box, in their drawer, and closed it shut.
Next, we took down some books. The first was a green leatherbound book with ‘LINNAEUS’ embossed in gold letters on the front. It was his journal from a trip he made to Lapland. It is filled with his notes, in his slanting handwriting, on the people, flowers and creatures of Lapland, and wonderful – if not that competent – drawings of local life.
We turned the pages and saw his charming sketches of ploughs, fish, skis, insects, coral, local Laplanders, embroidery on Sami clothing and tents. There were drawings of how the Lapps slept, ate, dried fish and even the kinds of games they played (throwing balls and a game that looks like chess). There is a beautiful sketch of a crane fly, and an interesting one of Andromeda being threatened by a sea monster beside one of an Andromeda plant being threatened by a newt. I really liked his drawing of an owlet and one of a Sami baby wrapped up cosily.
He tells how to cure chilblains with roasted reindeer cheese, how to fix a broken pot by boiling it in milk and how to make thread from reindeer hooves. He described the singing in Lapland: ‘No Laplander can sing, but instead of singing utters a noise resembling the barking of dogs.’
The journal was published as Iter Laponicum but it was brilliant to see the real thing, written in Lapland. Linnaeus brought it back to his home in Uppsala, along with a drum and a Lapp costume. There is a painting of him wearing it holding the drum and his Linnaea borealis plant, in the library upstairs at the Linnean Society.
I’d been told that Linnaeus was the first person to grow a banana in Europe, so I asked Lynda whether there was anything banana related in the collection. She opened up a book called Musa Cliffortiana Florens Hartecampi, all about that first banana. It was grown in the garden of Linnaeus’s friend George Clifford, in Holland. Musa is the genus for banana; it was named from musz, which is the Arabic word for ‘banana’; or perhaps for the nine Greek muses themselves. Inside the book is a fold-out drawing of the fruiting banana plant. It ends with a question: ‘Will my banana grow for years?’
Lynda then showed me Linnaeus’s most famous work, Systema Naturae. Published in 1735, it’s a history of all the living things he knew about at the time, divided up according to his sexual system for classifying them. He caused a bit of a scandal at the time by suggesting plants had a sex life. There are so many names he adopted which we still use today; magnolia, clematis, digitalis, jasmine, fuchsia, salvia.
Animals are included in the Systema, written down in a table, according to the genus Linnaeus assigned to them. If there was an animal he wasn’t sure about, he put it in ‘Worms’. He put humans in the same box as apes, which he didn’t want to do, but he couldn’t see a way around it. Anything he wasn’t sure actually existed he put in a box called ‘Paradoxa’, which contains the satyr, phoenix, dragon, unicorn and pelican. He wasn’t sure he believed in pelicans, because they were supposed to feed their young on their own blood. He also named stones, fossils and minerals. This first edition copy was huge, the only one that was published in such a big format. Linnaeus used to fold it into four and carry it around with him.
There are two bookcases filled with copies of Linnaeus’s work. He had many of his own publications bound with blank pages between printed ones so that he could make his own notes as he reread his books and update them as he found new species. His handwritten ideas are all over the blank pages, mostly in Latin. This room is the only place in the world where there are so many copies of Linnaeus’s books covered in his own annotations.
The day I visited the collection, thousands of Homo sapiens were rushing straight past the doors of the Linnean Society to see the David Hockney exhibition. I saw it too. Just think of all those flowers Hockney painted all over Yorkshire, some buried under snow, others popping up into the sunlight after the winter underground, each one with a scientific name, many of them coined by Linnaeus.
The entire collection has recently been digitized and is up on the Linnaean Society’s website. Researchers around the world look things up regularly, leaving the centuries old collections undisturbed in their wood-panelled room. There is a postcard of Linnaeus in there, propped up against the books, watching over the lot.
[The world