Carl Linnaeus has a variety
names. Swedes know him as Carl von Linné,
the name he took when raised to the nobility in 1757. In the Anglo-Saxon world
he is normally referedto as Carl Lenneaus, which name he was given at his
baptism. The Latin ending of his sur-name indicates academic status, without
which he would have been called Carl Nilsson, after his father. Then again,
Linnaeus has been called Princeps
botanicorum, the Prince of Botanist, “The Pliny of the North”, “The Second
Adam” and other names besides. To present-day botanist and zoologist who concrn
themselves with matter of taxonomy, he is jus plain “L.”, the letter which
indicates the naming of an outstandingly large number of imoportand organism.
A
Swedish proverb says that a loved child has many names. Perhaps the same goes
for an importand person, and it was certaintly no common occurrence for a
scientist and professor to be elevated to the nobility. Not many scientists
were accorded equality of status with Pliny, the great natural historian of
antiquity. And of course it was grander still to camper Linnaeus with the ruler
of Paradise and the first namer of animals. Thousands of plants and animals
remind us of the person who named them, and innumerable garland of flowers have
been tied in honour of Linnaeus. Every Swedish povince has its emblematic
flower, and the Twinflower, provincial emblem of Smaland, is called Linnea
after the great son of that province, putting all Swedes in mind of him
personally. Not until the earth once more lies empty and desolate will the name
of Linnaeus be forgotten.
Linnaeus
made rather a big thing of his humble origins. “A great man can step forth
from a small origins,” he wrote in one
of his autobiographies. However charming and uncomplicated he might seem, he
was supremely career-minded. This, however, is to moralise, and as a historian
one ought rahter tahan emphasise the social mobility so typical of Swedish
society at the time. Linnaeus’ grandfather was a peasant, his fahter entered
the Church, he himself became a physician and eventually a professor and a
member of the nobility. One could scarcely advance any futher than that. Sweden
was a relatively open society whose agrarian population was traditinally
endowed with strength and liberty.
Trought
the centuries, the culture of the parsonage has been the backbone of science
and the arts in Sweden. This is due to the close connection between Church and
State in Sweden during the 17th century, known is Swedish as “the
Age of Greatness”. The Lutheran Church was indispensable to the State as an
educator of the peasant population in peacetime and as shepherd of souls in the
great wars of the period. The glory and the misery of the time demanded moral
fibre. When te bubble burst, with the death of Charles XXI on his Norwegian
campaign in 1718, the established Church remained to pilot the country into the
more pacific and culturally fertile Age of Liberty.
