The Prince of Botanist, The Pliny of North, The Second Adam, “L”

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 17^th 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.