It’s all in a name - The Linnaean Society
Carl Linneaus
The Linnaean Society is one of a number of learned societies that have made Burlington House their home. It was founded in 1788 by the amateur botanist Sir James Edward Smith, who spurred on by the President of the Royal Society Sir Joseph Banks, purchased the collection of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who is known as the father of taxonomy - the classification and naming of biological organisms based on shared characteristics. This foundation collection included Linnaeus’s correspondence, books and specimen and can be accessed as part of the society’s regular tours.
The Linnaean Society received its Royal Charter in 1802 and as the oldest society dedicated to the study of natural history, it reaches out to a wide audience through education, its publications and many programmes which include current challenges of the natural world, such as biodiversity loss and climate change.
The society’s membership has featured many illustrious scientists including its former president Robert Brown, who made contributions to the discovery of the cell nucleus in the 19th century; physician Edward Jenner, famous for his smallpox immunisation technique; biologist and anthropologist Thomas Huxley who’s many achievement include positing modern birds have descended from theropod dinosaurs; and contemporary naturalist Sir David Attenborough. Unequivocally, the society’s most celebrated moment took place the 1 July 1858, when papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace where read to a somewhat unresponsive audience, espousing their theories of evolution. It was Wallace’s outline of his theory, which finally spurred Darwin to make his research public after many years of working on his Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Notably, neither Darwin nor Wallace attended this meeting which was organised by the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew Joseph Dalton Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, author of the groundbreaking Principles of Geology.
By the time these scientific geniuses were laying the groundwork of the new Victorian popular sciences, Linnaeus’s system had gained a strong following amongst natural historians worldwide. This success was aided by the rationalism of the French Revolutionaries in Paris, who championed Linnaeus, as they obliterated the legacy of the Comte de Buffon, whose study of natural history was much broader in scope and understanding compared to that of his Swedish peer, having insightfully speculated about concepts of extinction and evolution at the dawn of the Ancien Régime’s collapse. Here in London, the Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander promoted the Linnaean system, from his eminent post as curator of the natural history collection of the British Museum in 1763. That same year Solander went alongside Joseph Banks, on an epic journey in the South Pacific aboard Captain James Cook’s Endeavour. The following decade, Smith’s purchase and foundation of the Linnaean Society in London, cemented Linnaeus’s system over others (Sir Hans Sloane used his own classification system), becoming an efficient and relatively simple method for naming species, hierarchically ranking them and placing them on genealogical trees.
The Darwin-Wallace Medal - awarded to those who make contributions to evolutionary science.
This system, published and revised by Carl Linnaeus in his Systema Naturea between 1735 and his death in 1778, popularised the use of a binomial system to name members of the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. The first part refers to its genus and second part names the individual species. Our Great White Pelican friends at St James’s Park were classified by Linnaeus as:
Kingdom: Animalia
Class: Aves
Order: Pelecaniformes
Genus: Pelecanus
Species: P. Onocrotalus
This led him to name them Pelecanus Onocrotalus, a very western Latin name and Greek surname for a bird of African origin. These original 5 groupings have been greatly increased in number in modern times, with some taxonomist using up to 22 categories including phylum, family and subspecies to name a few. Furthermore, our growing understanding of the complexity of life, has placed the original 3 kingdoms under Domains, a higher taxonomic rank which comprises Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya (the latter divided in kingdoms covering organisms with cells with a membrane-bound nucleus - fungi, animals, plants, seaweeds etc).
By modern standards, Linnaeus's system of classification, indeed appears inadequate. Throughout his life he named just over 12,000 species of which 4,000 were animal. This is understandable as the system was designed to slot in new species as these were discovered. In contrast to Banks, Darwin and Wallace, Carl Linnaeus did not base his work on adventurous travels and first hand field exploration, but gathered his specimen through a network of international patrons and via his ‘apostles’ - young adventurers trained by the man himself and sent to far flung exotic places around the globe (one such apostle was the previously mentioned Daniel Solander). The length and dangerous nature of these missions meant many apostles never returned and that Linnaeus always had limited access to specimen, never mind ones that had not perished en route to Uppsala, where Linnaeus held the rectorship of the university.
Nevertheless, Carl Linnaeus could have never envisaged that he was only observing an infinitesimal small sample of Earth’s life, as underpinning his vision was a staunch belief in the ‘fixity’ of life, the idea that all life is physically unchanged since the moment of Biblical Creation. More controversially, Linnaeus who coined the term homo sapiens, classified humans in four varieties: European, America, Asian and African. These he distinguished by racist stereotypes, foreshadowing racial and eugenic theory of the late 19th century.
Just like the British Museum reassessment of Sir Hans Sloane, the Linnaean Society has been forthcoming in addressing the darker legacy of Linnaeus’s ideas of race. Ultimately, the limited scope of the Linnaean system has seen it superseded by other classification system, chiefly amongst them cladistics which relies on grouping species under an ever growing tree of evolutionary life. Yet, despite these misgivings, Linnaean’s spirit survives in the still widely used binomial nomenclature. Linnaean-ism might not be fit for purpose in the 21st century’s study of the natural world, but it fulfils the most basic of linguistic needs: to name things.
Modern clade showing the 3 Domains of Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya
