He was a staunch Swedish patriot and only visited England once. So why did Linnaeus’ notebooks and specimens end up in London?
Anna Winterbottom
The taxonomist Carl von Linné (1707–1778), better known as Linnaeus, is a national hero in his home country of Sweden. He famously introduced binomial nomenclature – two names denoting the genus and species – for plants in his Species plantarum (1753), and for animals in the tenth edition of Systema natura (1758).
However, Linnaeus’ herbarium and zoological collection, as well as his letters and notebooks are held not in the country of his birth, but by the Linnean Society of London.
A Botanic Republic
Linnaeus loved his country. He is often credited with the concept of ‘national science’ and understood its economic potential. His efforts to generate revenue for Sweden even led him to establish a method of cultivating pearls.
As well as being fiercely patriotic, Linnaeus flourished within what he termed the ‘Botanic Republic’. In this new world, European natural philosophers exchanged letters, ideas and specimens and hitched rides on voyages of trade and discovery around the globe in search for new species, extracting their medical and commercial benefits, and transplanting them across their expanding empires.
Linnaeus visited England only once, as part of a European tour. After taking in Lapland, Dalarna and Leiden, he stayed in London in July and August 1736. Here, he was introduced to Hans Sloane through their mutual friend George Clifford of the Dutch East India Company. Sloane’s 1725 Natural History of the West Indies inspired the descriptions of new species in Species plantarum.
Acts of the Apostles
As Professor of Botany and Medicine at Uppsala (1741–1775), Linnaeus used his network of contacts to obtain places for his students, or ‘apostles’, on voyages overseas. One pupil, Daniel Solander, was selected by the botanist Joseph Banks as his assistant on Cook’s first circumnavigation of the globe (1768–1771). Others travelled to Russia, China and South America, sending back samples and nurturing Linnaeus’ largely unsuccessful attempts to acclimatise exotic species, including tea, in Sweden.
It was Solander who helped bind the Swedish taxonomist most closely to London. After he returned from the Southern Hemispherein 1771, bearing vines and mulberry trees for silk worms, Solander settled in London as Banks’ assistant. Linnaeus never saw the fruits of these journeys, however: Banks’ promise in a letter of 1772 to bring specimens to Uppsala was never kept, leaving Linnaeus lamenting that were it not for his age and infirmity ‘I would set out this very day to see this great hero in botany’.
Solander became keeper of the Department of Natural History, British Museum in 1773. Here, he introduced the Linnean system of classification to English botanists, using it to order the collection of Sloane’s specimens that would form the basis of the Natural History Museum. But what of Linnaeus’ own specimens?
Linnaeus’ Collection Reaches London
With the death in 1783 of Linnaeus’ son and last heir, the fate of his extensive collections became uncertain. Banks turned down the opportunity to acquire the specimens, but persuaded James Edward Smith (1759–1828) to make the purchase for 1,000 guineas. Four years later, Smith founded the Linnean Society of London, and became its first president. Today, the collection is preserved in a temperature-controlled vault in the Society’s basement.
Image courtesy of the Linnean Society.