In fact, the leather-bound volumes and everything else in this intimate little vault belonged to the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, one of the most influential figures in science, and also one of the most colorful. He invented the system of classification by which every living species now gets its two-part scientific name, by genus and species — for instance, Homo sapiens, a name Linnaeus coined. In a sense, he invented the modern science of living things, largely with materials gathered in this room.
Walking around the room, Ms. Douglas pulls open mahogany specimen drawers containing pinned-out dragonflies that last took wing 250 years ago, shells in small, handmade tin boxes, and a mullet pressed flat as a leaf on a sheet. In one drawer, the specimens are cradled like candies in heavy wrapping paper. Some early naturalist shipped his trophies to Linnaeus “wrapped in little screws of paper,” she says, “and they're still in little screws of paper.”
She takes down a 30-inch-high double-folio volume, the author's own copy of Systema Naturae from 1735, the first published statement of the Linnaean system, and lays it open to a page of species organized into neat boxes.
“And this is where it all begins,” she says.
FOR modern travelers, it is almost impossible to comprehend how vast and confusing the natural world must have seemed at the beginning of the 18th century. Australia and Antarctica were still largely blank spots on the map. But explorers in Africa, Asia and the Americas were already reporting, and sometimes sending home, a bewildering assortment of strange new species, from the iguana and the opossum to the chambered nautilus.
How did these creatures live? Where did they fit in the scheme of Creation? How did that change ideas about our own species?
