Swedish naturalist, "father of modern botanical systematics" and creator of modern biological nomenclature.

Born May 23, 1707 in Roshult in the province of Småland in the family of a village pastor. His parents wanted Karl to become a clergyman, but from his youth he was fascinated by natural history, especially botany. These studies were encouraged by a local doctor, who advised Linnaeus to choose the profession of a physician, since at that time botany was considered part of pharmacology. In 1727, Linnaeus entered Lund University, and the following year he moved to Uppsala University, where the teaching of botany and medicine was better placed. In Uppsala, he lived and worked with Olaf Celsius, a theologian and amateur botanist who contributed to the preparation of the book Biblical Botany (Hierobotanicum), a list of plants mentioned in the Bible. In 1729, as a New Year's gift to Celsius, Linnaeus wrote an essay Introduction to Plant Engagements (Praeludia sponsalorum plantarun), in which he poetically described their sexual process. This work not only delighted Celsius, but also aroused the interest of teachers and students of the university. She predetermined the main range of future interests of Linnaeus - the classification of plants according to their reproductive organs. In 1731, having defended his dissertation, Linnaeus became an assistant to professor of botany O. Rudbek. The following year he traveled to Lapland. For three months he wandered around this then wild country, collecting plant samples. The Uppsala Scientific Society, which sponsored this work, published only a brief report on it - Flora Lapponica. Linnaeus's detailed work on the plants of Lapland was published only in 1737, and his vividly written diary of the expedition Lapland life (Lachesis Lapponica) was published after the author's death in Latin translation.

In 1733-1734 Linnaeus lectured and conducted scientific work at the university, wrote a number of books and articles. However, continuing a medical career traditionally required a degree abroad. In 1735 he entered the University of Harderwijk in Holland, where he soon received a doctorate in medicine. In Holland, he became close to the famous Leiden physician G. Boerhaave, who recommended Linnaeus to the mayor of Amsterdam, Georg Kliffort, a passionate gardener who by that time had collected a magnificent collection of exotic plants. Cliffort made Linnaeus his personal physician and instructed him to identify and classify the specimens he bred. The result was the excellent treatise Cliffort's Garden (Hortus Clifortianus), published in 1737.

In 1736-1738, the first editions of many of Linnaeus's works were published in Holland: in 1736 - the System of Nature (Systema naturae), the Botanical Library (Bibliotheca botanica) and the Fundamentals of Botany (Fundamenta botanica); in 1737 - Criticism of botany (Critica botanica), Genera of plants (Genera plantarum), Flora of Lapland (Flora Lapponica) and Clifffort Garden (Hortus Cliffortianus); in 1738 - Classes plantarum, Collection of genera (Corollarium generum) and Sexual method (Methodus sexualist). In addition, in 1738 Linnaeus edited a book on fish Ichthyologia (Ichthyologia), which remained unfinished after the death of his friend Peter Artedi. Botanical works, especially plant genera, formed the basis of modern plant taxonomy. In them, Linnaeus described and applied a new classification system that greatly simplified the definition of organisms. In his method, which he called "sexual", the main emphasis was on the structure and number of reproductive structures of plants, i.e. stamens (male organs) and pistils (female organs). Although the Linnaean classification is largely artificial, it was so convenient to all the systems that existed at that time that it soon gained general acceptance. Its rules were formulated so simply and clearly that they seemed to be the laws of nature, and Linnaeus himself, of course, considered them as such. However, his views on the sexual process in plants, although not original, also found their critics: some accused Linnaeus of immorality, others of excessive anthropomorphism.

An even more daring work than botanical works was the famous System of Nature. Its first edition of about a dozen printed sheets, representing a general outline of the intended book, was an attempt to classify all the creations of nature - animals, plants and minerals - into classes, orders, genera and species, and also to establish rules for their identification. Corrected and enlarged editions of this treatise appeared 12 times during Linnaeus's lifetime and were reprinted several times after his death.

In 1738 Linnaeus, on behalf of Cliffort, visited the botanical centers of England. By that time, he had already earned international recognition among naturalists and received invitations to work in Holland and Germany. However, Linnaeus chose to return to Sweden. In 1739 he opened a medical practice in Stockholm and continued to study natural history. In 1741 he was appointed professor of medicine at Uppsala University, and in 1742 he also became a professor of botany there. In the following years, he mainly taught and wrote scientific works, but at the same time he made several scientific expeditions to little-studied areas of Sweden and published a report on each of them. Linnaeus's enthusiasm, his fame, and, most importantly, his ability to infect others with the desire to search for something new attracted many followers to him. He collected a huge herbarium and a collection of plants. Collectors from all over the world sent him specimens of unknown forms of life, and he described their findings in his books.

In 1745 Linnaeus publishes Flora of Sweden (Flora Suecica), in 1746 - Fauna of Sweden (Fauna Suecica), in 1748 - Uppsala Garden (Hortus Upsaliensis). In Sweden and abroad, more and more editions of the System of Nature continue to appear. Some of them, especially the sixth (1748), the tenth (1758) and the twelfth (1766), substantially supplemented the previous ones. The famous 10th and 12th editions became multi-volume encyclopedias, not only an attempt to classify natural objects, but also giving brief descriptions, i.e. distinctive features of all species of animals, plants and minerals known by that time. An article about each species was supplemented with information about its geographical distribution, habitat, behavior and varieties. The 12th edition was the most complete, but the 10th became the most important. It was from the moment of its publication that the priority of modern zoological nomenclature was established, because it was in this book that Linnaeus first gave double (binary, or binomial) names to all animal species known to him. In 1753 he completed his great work Types of Plants (Species plantarum); it contained descriptions and binary names of all plant species that determined modern botanical nomenclature. In the book Philosophy of Botany (Philosophia botanica), published in 1751, Linnaeus aphoristically outlined the principles that guided him in the study of plants. The German writer, thinker and naturalist Goethe admitted: "Apart from Shakespeare and Spinoza, Linnaeus had the strongest influence on me."

May 23, 2007 marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus (1707 - 1778), a Swedish naturalist who created a taxonomy of the three kingdoms of nature - plants, animals and minerals, who described about 10 thousand species of animals and plants. The Linnean collections are kept at the Natural History Museum in London. Moscow State University has several sheets of his herbarium.

Alexander Rautian, an employee of the Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, tells how scientists see the discoveries of Carl Linnaeus today.

- Who was Carl Linnaeus after all, and what did he do?

- The main thing that they say about Linnaeus today in educational courses is wrong. They say that Linnaeus is the creator of a certain system. But the system that he created and thanks to which he became famous is not called a system at all in our time. In modern times, what Linnaeus did is called a definitive key. This is text with which you can identify a particular plant or animal. For example, it is asked, five stamens, less or more, etc., you choose and move from feature to feature and, in the end, you will recognize the plant.

Today we are striving to create a natural system of living beings that would reflect, first of all, their nature, and not just their external features. We believe that the nature of living beings is related to their evolution. And the vast majority of naturalists of the time of Linnaeus believed that the natural system should reflect the providence of God. And Linnaeus thought so too. He was sure that there are as many species as were created during the act of divine creation. After all, he was the son of a Protestant minister and was properly brought up in the appropriate Protestant spirit, and nowhere seriously deviated from this. True, it must be said that for a short time his compositions were banned by the Vatican.

Natural systems were tried to be created even before the birth of Linnaeus. The main obstacle to this was the lack of a developed feature space. Moreover, a developed feature space is required in the same way, both to create a defining key and to create a natural system. And here is the main contribution of Linnaeus to the creation of what we now call the system, that is, the natural system or phylogenetic system, this is, first of all, the creation of botanical morphology. It is clear that a lot was added after Linnaeus, but the foundations of botanical morphology were undoubtedly laid by Linnaeus, and here his merits are greater than any of his contemporary.

- Is it possible to say that Linnaeus, first of all, was an outstanding botanist?

And he considered himself a botanist. But his system of nature included all three kingdoms—it included plants, animals, and even minerals. The principle by which the systems of minerals, plants and animals were built by Linnaeus was the same - this is a definitive key. The key is the search engine. In the 20th century, a corresponding theorem was proved that a hierarchical organization is optimal for any search engine, if there are no additional properties that speed up the search. Linnaeus created a search engine for the most numerous natural objects that we even know. If we assume that the names of plants and animals are a kind of terms, then there are more terms in botany and zoology than in all other areas of science.

– What was the significance of his work for the development of science?

- Huge. He quite consciously decided to create an artificial system with the help of which any student could calmly determine the corresponding plants, animals and even minerals during practical classes.

Of course, far fewer species were known in Linnaeus' time than today. But still quite a lot - by the end of his life, Linnaeus knew tens of thousands of species. The next circumstance that is usually mentioned is that Linnaeus introduced the so-called binomial nomenclature.

The name of organisms in the pre-Linneev period was constructed as follows: the genus was indicated, and then the specific difference followed. But the specific difference could not be formulated in the form of a single word. And the names of the species turned into rather long phrases. The most important achievement of the introduction of dual nomenclature by Linnaeus is that he divided the definition of a species into a characteristic and a name. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this circumstance. The main advantage of any name is that it should be conservative. If the names change every day, then it is impossible to remember them. And the characteristic is dynamic by definition, and in Linnaeus' Philosophy of Shoes it is written that with the introduction of each new species into the genus, the characteristics of all species of this genus may change. Because you now need to distinguish each of the former species from one new species of the same genus. Thus, we received conservative names and dynamic characteristics (or diagnoses). And we owe this achievement to Linnaeus.

Another circumstance that is usually not talked about - and this is very sad. When one characterizes science in general, the first thing that is mentioned is the scientific method. The science of modern times is characterized primarily from the point of view of the method, as the era of experience and experiment. And empirical facts are a collection that serves as an object of comparison. Science fundamentally does not deal with single events, it deals with reproducible and repetitive events. Another thing is that the invariance of events can be established using the comparative method and only it. And Linnaeus created his own method. The first serious work devoted to the comparative method in modern science is Linnaeus' Philosophy of Botany. When you take the "Philosophy of Botany", it was first translated into Russian only in 1989, but this work can be read as modern. Because the descriptive method of Linnaeus is the tool that even today only the most competent biologists are good at. His descriptive method has not essentially become obsolete in the last three hundred years.

Carl Linnaeus in Lapland clothes. 1737. Netherlands.

What kind of person was Linnaeus?

– Linnaeus, of course, is first of all spoken of as a scientist. And I think he was a wonderful person. Linnaeus gained world fame when he left his wild country - from what was then Sweden. This is the periphery of Europe with a barely developed science, with an archaic education - this is the era of Charles XII and his heirs. In general, his trip to Europe was stimulated by domestic circumstances: he decided to get married. And his father told him that it was impossible to marry a beggar. How can a person engaged in science acquire prosperity? With a degree. In those days, a degree in Sweden could not be obtained at all. Therefore, it is not surprising that he went to defend his dissertation in Germany. By the way, he defended his thesis for a medical degree and it is clear why - medicine is just what brought money. Botany didn't bring money even then.

But when he returned to Sweden, he became the royal physician and, accordingly, the chief physician of Sweden.

He began to write his main works around 1730, but he said that everything that he managed to do in his life was thought out by him until the age of 27. And this is very similar to the truth. Because when we see how many books were published in a very short time after his arrival in Europe. In fact, the boy came to defend his degree and began to publish one book after another. Moreover, these are books that immediately acquired world fame. But this happened because the need to marry made him go to Europe. And he not only received world fame, he received huge money for those times. The father of his future wife, seeing how famous and wealthy Linnaeus had become, sent him a letter where he wrote: you, apparently, are not going to return to your homeland and, probably, my daughter can consider herself free. Linnaeus was already engaged to his fiancee, and in the Protestant world this was a very serious commitment. And Linnaeus left everything and left for Sweden almost immediately after receiving the letter. For him, love for a woman was not an empty phrase. And he spent his whole life with this woman.

For his scientific merits, Karl Linnaeus received the dignity of a count with a coat of arms, as it should be. His motto is: "Deeds increase fame."

Carl Linnaeus

(1707-1778)

Carl Linnaeus, the famous Swedish naturalist, was born in Sweden on May 13, 1707. He was of an humble family, his ancestors were simple peasants; father was a poor country priest. The next year after the birth of his son, he received a more profitable parish in Stenbroghult, the year and the whole childhood of Carl Linnaeus passed until the age of ten.

My father was a great lover of flowers and gardening; in the picturesque Stenbroghult he planted a garden, which soon became the first in the whole province. This garden and his father's studies, of course, played a significant role in the spiritual development of the future founder of scientific botany. The boy was given a special corner in the garden, several beds, where he was considered a complete master; they were called so - "Karl's garden"

When the boy was 10 years old, he was sent to an elementary school in the city of Vexie. The gifted child's schoolwork was going badly; he continued to engage in botany with enthusiasm, and the preparation of lessons was tiring for him. The father was going to take the young man from the gymnasium, but the case pushed him into contact with the local doctor Rotman. At Rotman, the classes of the “underachieving” gymnasium went better. The doctor began to gradually introduce him to medicine and even - contrary to the teachers' reviews - made him fall in love with Latin.

After graduating from high school, Karl enters Lund University, but soon moves from there to one of the most prestigious universities in Sweden - Uppsala. Linnaeus was only 23 years old when the professor of botany Oluas Celzki took him as his assistant, after which, while still a student, Karl began teaching at the university. The journey through Lapland became very important for the young scientist. Linnaeus walked almost 700 kilometers, collected significant collections, and as a result published his first book, Flora of Lapland.

In the spring of 1735, Linnaeus arrived in Holland, in Amsterdam. In the small university town of Gardquick, he passed the exam and on June 24 he defended his dissertation on a medical topic - about fever. The immediate goal of his journey was reached, but Charles remained. He remained, fortunately for himself and for science: the rich and highly cultured Holland served as the cradle for his ardent creative activity and his resounding fame.

One of his new friends, Dr. Gronov, suggested that he publish some work; then Linnaeus compiled and printed the first draft of his famous work, which laid the foundation for systematic zoology and botany in the modern sense. This was the first edition of his "Systema naturae", containing only 14 huge pages for the time being, on which brief descriptions of minerals, plants and animals were grouped in the form of tables. With this edition, a series of rapid scientific successes of Linnaeus begins.

In his new works, published in 1736-1737, his main and most fruitful ideas were already contained in a more or less finished form: a system of generic and specific names, improved terminology, an artificial system of the plant kingdom.

At this time, he received a brilliant offer to become the personal physician of George Cliffort with a salary of 1000 guilders and a full allowance.

Despite the successes that surrounded Linnaeus in Holland, little by little he began to pull home. In 1738, he returns to his homeland and encounters unexpected problems. He, accustomed for three years of living abroad to universal respect, friendship and signs of attention of the most prominent and famous people, at home, in his homeland, was just a doctor without a job, without practice and without money, and no one cared about his scholarship . So Linnaeus the botanist gave way to Linnaeus the doctor, and his favorite activities were stopped for a while.

However, already in 1739, the Swedish Diet assigned him one hundred lukats of annual maintenance with the obligation to teach botany and mineralogy.

Finally, he found an opportunity to marry, and on June 26, 1739, a five-year-delayed wedding took place. Alas, as is often the case, his wife was the exact opposite of her husband. An ill-mannered, rude and quarrelsome woman, without intellectual interests, who was only interested in the financial aspects of her husband. Linnaeus had one son and several daughters; the mother loved her daughters, and they grew up under her influence as uneducated and petty girls of a bourgeois family. To her son, a gifted boy, the mother had a strange antipathy, pursued him in every possible way and tried to turn her father against him. But Linnaeus loved his son and passionately developed in him those inclinations for which he himself suffered so much in childhood.

In 1742, Linnaeus's dream came true and he became a professor of botany at his native university. The rest of his life was spent in this city almost without a break. He occupied the department for more than thirty years and left it only shortly before his death.

Now Linnaeus ceased to engage in medical practice, was engaged only in scientific research. He described all medicinal plants known at that time and studied the effect of medicines made from them.

During this time, he invented the thermometer using the Celsius temperature scale.

But the main business of his life, Linnaeus still considered the systematization of plants. The main work "The System of Plants" took 25 years, and only in 1753 did he publish his main work.

The scientist decided to systematize the entire plant world of the Earth. At the time when Liney began his career, zoology was in a period of exceptional predominance of taxonomy. The task that she then set herself was simply to get acquainted with all the breeds of animals living on the globe, without regard to their internal structure and to the connection of individual forms with each other; the subject of zoological writings of that time was a simple enumeration and description of all known animals.

Thus, zoology and botany of that time were mainly concerned with the study and description of species, but boundless confusion reigned in their recognition. The descriptions that the author gave of new animals or plants were inconsistent and inaccurate. The second main shortcoming of the then science was the lack of a more or less basic and precise classification.

These basic shortcomings of systematic zoology and botany were corrected by the genius of Linnaeus. Remaining on the same ground of the study of nature, on which his predecessors and contemporaries stood, he was a powerful reformer of science. Its merit is purely methodical. He did not discover new areas of knowledge and hitherto unknown laws of nature, but he created a new method, clear, logical. And with the help of it, he brought light and order to where chaos and confusion reigned before him, which gave a huge impetus to science, paving the way for further research in a powerful way. This was a necessary step in science, without which further progress would not have been possible.

The scientist proposed a binary nomenclature - a system of scientific naming of plants and animals. Based on the structural features, he divided all plants into 24 classes, also highlighting separate genera and species. Each name, in his opinion, should have consisted of two words - generic and specific designations.

Despite the fact that the principle applied by him was rather artificial, it turned out to be very convenient and became generally pleasant in scientific classification, retaining its significance in our time. But in order for the new nomenclature to be fruitful, it was necessary for the new nomenclature to be fruitful, it was necessary that the species that received the conditional name, at the same time, be so accurately and in detail described that they could not be confused with other species of the same kind. Linnaeus did just that: he was the first to introduce a strictly defined, precise language and a precise definition of features into science.

In his work "Fundamental Botany", published in Amsterdam during his life with Cliffort and which was the result of seven years of work, the foundations of the botanical terminology that he used to describe plants are outlined.

The zoological system of Linnaeus did not play such a major role in science as the botanical one, although in some respects it stood above it, as less artificial, but it did not represent its main advantages - convenience in determining. Linnaeus had little knowledge of anatomy.

Linnaeus' work gave a huge impetus to systematic botany and zoology. The developed terminology and convenient nomenclature made it easier to cope with a huge amount of material that had previously been so difficult to understand. Soon all classes of the plant and animal kingdom were systematically studied, and the number of described species increased from hour to hour.

Linnaeus later applied his principle to the classification of all nature, in particular minerals and rocks. He also became the first scientist to classify humans and apes as the same group of animals, primates. As a result of his observations, the naturalist compiled another book - "The System of Nature". He worked on it all his life, from time to time republishing his work. In total, the scientist prepared 12 editions of this work, which gradually turned from a small book into a voluminous multi-volume publication.

The last years of Linnaeus's life were overshadowed by senility and illness. He died on January 10, 1778, at the age of seventy-one.

After his death, the chair of botany at Uppsala University was given to his son, who zealously set about continuing his father's work. But in 1783 he suddenly fell ill and died at the age of forty-two. The son was not married, and with his death, the lineage of Linnaeus in the male generation ceased.

By the 18th century scientists and nature lovers have done a great job collecting and describing plants and animals all over the world. But it became more and more difficult to navigate in the ocean of information accumulated by them. The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus generalized and brought this knowledge into a system. He laid the foundations of modern taxonomy.

Carl Linnaeus was born on May 23, 1707 in the family of a village priest. Carl's mother from childhood brought up in him a love for all living things, especially for flowers.

But the future president of the Swedish Academy of Sciences remained very indifferent to schoolwork. Latin was not given to him at all. The teachers said that education, apparently, was not up to the boy - it would be better to teach him some kind of craft. The angry father decided to send Karl to be trained by a shoemaker.

And the career of a shoemaker would have been waiting for Liney, if a familiar doctor had not persuaded the boy's father to allow him to study medicine. In addition, he helped Carl finish high school.

Karl studied medicine and biology at the universities of the Swedish cities of Lund and Uppsala. He lived in his student years in poverty.

When Karl was 25 years old, the leadership of Uppsala University invited him to go on a scientific journey through northern Scandinavia - Lapland, to explore its nature. He carried all his luggage on his shoulders. During this journey, he ate what he had to, barely got out of the swampy swamps, fought mosquitoes. And once he ran into a more serious enemy - a robber who almost killed him. Despite all the obstacles, Linnaeus collected samples of Lapland plants.

At home, Linnaeus could not find a permanent job in his specialty, and for several years he moved to Holland, where he was in charge of one of the best botanical gardens in the country.

Here he received the degree of doctor, here in 1735 his most famous work, The System of Nature, was published. During the life of Linnaeus, 12 editions of this book were published. All this time, Linnaeus constantly supplemented it and increased its volume from 14 pages to 3 volumes.

Carl Linnaeus system:

The concept of the form.

In order to “sort through” a huge number of descriptions of plants and animals, some kind of systematic unit was needed. Such a unit, common to all living things, Linnaeus considered the species. By species, Linnaeus called a group of individuals similar to each other, like children of the same parents and their children. A species consists of many similar individuals that produce fertile offspring. For example, forest raspberries are one species, stone berries are another, cloudberries are the third species of plants. All domestic cats are one species, tigers are another, lions are a third species of animals. Consequently, the whole organic world consists of various types of plants and animals. All living nature consists, as it were, of separate links - species.

Linnaeus discovered and described about 1,500 species of plants and over 400 species of animals, he distributed all types of plants and animals into large groups - classes, he divided each class into orders, each order into genera. Each genus of Linnaeus was composed of similar species.

Nomenclature.

Linnaeus began to give names to species in the very Latin that was so poorly given to him in his school years. Latin was at that time the international language of science. Thus, Linnaeus solved a difficult problem: after all, when names were given in different languages, the same species could be described under many names.

A very important merit of Linnaeus was the introduction of double species names (binary nomenclature) into practice. He proposed to name each species with two words. The first is the name of the genus, which includes closely related species. For example, a lion, a tiger, a domestic cat belong to the genus Felis (Cat). The second word is the name of the species itself (respectively, Felis leo, Felis tigris, Felis do-mestica). In the same way, the European Spruce and Tien Shan Spruce (blue) species are combined into the genus Spruce, the White Hare and Brown Hare species into the Hare genus. Thanks to the double nomenclature, the similarity, commonality, unity of the species that form one genus is revealed.

Systematics of animals.

Linnaeus divided animals into 6 classes:

mammals

Amphibians (in this class he placed amphibians and reptiles)

Insects

The number of "worms" includes molluscs, jellyfish, various worms, and all microorganisms (the latter were combined by Linnaeus into a single genus - Chaos infusorium).

Man (whom he called "reasonable man", Homo sapiens) Linnaeus quite boldly for his time placed in the class of mammals and the detachment of primates along with monkeys. He did it 120 years before Charles Darwin. He did not believe that man was descended from other primates, but he saw a great similarity in their structure.

Systematics of plants.

Linnaeus approached the systematization of plants in more detail than the systematization of animals. He singled out 24 classes among plants. Linnaeus understood that the most essential and characteristic part of a plant is a flower. He attributed plants with one stamen in a flower to the 1st class, to the 2nd - with two, to the 3rd - with three, etc. Mushrooms, lichens, algae, horsetails, ferns - in general, all, devoid of flowers, were in the 24th class ("mystery").

The artificiality of Linnaeus' systematics.

The system of plants and animals of Linnaeus was largely artificial. Plants far from each other (for example, carrots and currants) ended up in the same class only because their flowers have the same number of stamens. Many related plants ended up in different classes. The systematics of Linnaeus is artificial, also because it helped to recognize plants and animals, but did not reflect the course of the historical development of the world.

Linnaeus was aware of this deficiency in his system. He believed that future naturalists should create a natural system of plants and animals, which should take into account all the features of organisms, and not just one or two signs. Trying to develop a natural plant system, Linnaeus became convinced that the science of that time did not provide the knowledge necessary for this.

Despite the artificiality, the Linnaean system played a positive role in biology. The systematic subdivisions and dual nomenclature proposed by Linnaeus have become firmly established in science and are used in modern botany and zoology. Later, two more divisions were introduced:

Type - the highest division that unites similar classes;

Family - uniting similar genera

Linnaeus innovations.

Carl Linnaeus reformed the botanical language. He first proposed such plant names as: corolla, anther, nectary, ovary, stigma, filament, receptacle, perianth. In total, K. Linnaeus introduced about a thousand terms into botany.

Linnaeus' views on nature.

Science at that time was influenced by religion. Linnaeus was an idealist, he argued that in nature there are as many species of plants and animals as "how many different forms the almighty created at the beginning of the world." Linnaeus believed that plant and animal species do not change; they retained their characteristics "from the moment of creation." According to Linnaeus, every modern species is the offspring of the original parent pair created by God. Each species reproduces, but retains, in his opinion, unchanged all the features of this ancestral pair.

As a good observer, Linnaeus could not help but see the contradictions between the ideas about the complete immutability of plants and animals with what is observed in nature. He allowed the formation of varieties within a species due to the influence of climate change and other external conditions on organisms.

The idealistic and metaphysical doctrine of the creation and immutability of species dominated biology until the beginning of the 19th century, until it was refuted as a result of the discovery of many proofs of evolution.

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778).

Carl Linnaeus, the famous Swedish naturalist, was born in Sweden, in the village of Rozgult, on May 23, 1707. He was of an humble family, his ancestors were simple peasants; father, Nils Linneus, was a poor country priest. The year after the birth of his son, he received a more profitable parish in Stenbroghult, where Carl Linnaeus spent his entire childhood up to the age of ten.

My father was a great lover of flowers and gardening; in the picturesque Stenbroghult he planted a garden, which soon became the first in the whole province. This garden and his father's studies, of course, played a significant role in the spiritual development of the future founder of scientific botany. The boy was given a special corner in the garden, several beds, where he was considered a complete master; they were called so - "Karl's garden".

When the boy was ten years old, he was sent to an elementary school in the town of Vexie. The gifted child's schoolwork was going badly; he continued to engage in botany with enthusiasm, and the preparation of lessons was tiring for him. The father was about to take the young man from the gymnasium, but the case pushed him into contact with the local doctor Rotman. He was a good friend of the head of the school where Linnaeus began his studies, and from him he knew about the exceptional talents of the boy. At Rotman, the classes of the "underachieving" schoolboy went better. The doctor began to gradually introduce him to medicine and even - contrary to the teachers' reviews - made him fall in love with Latin.

After graduating from high school, Karl enters Lund University, but soon moves from there to one of the most prestigious universities in Sweden - Uppsala. Linnaeus was only 23 years old when the professor of botany Olof Celsius took him to be his assistant, after which he himself, while still a student. Carl began teaching at the university. Traveling around Lapland became very important for the young scientist. Linnaeus walked almost 700 kilometers, collected significant collections, and as a result published his first book, Flora of Lapland.

In the spring of 1735, Linnaeus arrived in Holland, in Amsterdam. In the small university town of Garderwick, he passed the exam and on June 24 he defended his dissertation on a medical topic - about fever, which he had written back in Sweden. The immediate goal of his journey was reached, but Charles remained. He remained, fortunately for himself and for science: the rich and highly cultured Holland served as the cradle for his ardent creative activity and his resounding fame.

One of his new friends, Dr. Gronov, suggested that he publish some work; then Linnaeus compiled and printed the first draft of his famous work, which laid the foundation for systematic zoology and botany in the modern sense. This was the first edition of his "Systema naturae", containing for the time being only 14 pages of a huge format, on which brief descriptions of minerals, plants and animals were grouped in the form of tables. With this edition, a series of rapid scientific successes of Linnaeus begins.

In his new works, published in 1736-1737, his main and most fruitful ideas were already contained in a more or less finished form - a system of generic and specific names, improved terminology, an artificial system of the plant kingdom.

At this time, he received a brilliant offer to become the personal physician of George Cliffort with a salary of 1000 guilders and a full allowance. Cliffort was one of the directors of the East India Company (which then prospered and filled Holland with wealth) and mayor of the city of Amsterdam. And most importantly, Cliffort was a passionate gardener, a lover of botany and the natural sciences in general. In his estate Gartekampe, near Harlem, there was a garden famous in Holland, in which, regardless of costs and tirelessly, he was engaged in the cultivation and acclimatization of foreign plants - plants of Southern Europe, Asia, Africa, America. At the garden, he had both herbariums and a rich botanical library. All this contributed to the scientific work of Linnaeus.

Despite the successes that surrounded Linnaeus in Holland, little by little he began to pull home. In 1738, he returned to his homeland and faced unexpected problems. He, accustomed for three years of living abroad to universal respect, friendship and signs of attention of the most prominent and famous people, at home, in his homeland, was just a doctor without a job, without practice and without money, and no one cared about his scholarship. . So Linnaeus the botanist gave way to Linnaeus the physician, and his favorite activities were abandoned for a while.

However, already in 1739, the Swedish Diet assigned him one hundred ducats of annual maintenance with the obligation to teach botany and mineralogy. At the same time, he was given the title of "royal botanist". In the same year, he received a position as Admiralty doctor in Stockholm: this position opened up a wide scope for his medical activities.

Finally, he found an opportunity to marry, and on June 26, 1739, a five-year-delayed wedding took place. Alas, as is often the case with people of outstanding talent, his wife was the exact opposite of her husband. An ill-mannered, rude and quarrelsome woman, without intellectual interests, she valued only the material side in the brilliant activity of her husband; she was a housewife, a cook wife. In economic matters, she held power in the house and in this respect had a bad influence on her husband, developing in him a tendency to avarice. There was a lot of sadness in their relationship in the family. Linnaeus had one son and several daughters; the mother loved her daughters, and they grew up under her influence as uneducated and petty girls of a bourgeois family. To her son, a gifted boy, the mother had a strange antipathy, pursued him in every possible way and tried to turn her father against him. The latter, however, she did not succeed: Linnaeus loved his son and passionately developed in him those inclinations for which he himself suffered so much in childhood.

In a short period of his life in Stockholm, Linnaeus took part in the founding of the Stockholm Academy of Sciences. It originated as a private association of several individuals, and the original number of its full members was only six. At its very first meeting, Linnaeus was appointed president by lot.

In 1742, Linnaeus's dream came true and he became a professor of botany at his native university. The botanical department in Uppsala acquired under Linnaeus an extraordinary brilliance, which she never had either before or after. The rest of his life was spent in this city almost without a break. He occupied the department for more than thirty years and left it only shortly before his death.

His financial position becomes strong; he has the good fortune to see the complete triumph of his scientific ideas, the rapid spread and universal recognition of his teachings. The name of Linnaeus was considered among the first names of that time: people like Rousseau treated him with respect. External successes and honors rained down on him from all sides. In that age - the age of enlightened absolutism and patrons - scientists were in fashion, and Linnaeus was one of those advanced minds of the last century, on which the courtesies of sovereigns rained down.

The scientist bought himself a small estate near Uppsala Gammarba, where he spent the summer in the last 15 years of his life. Foreigners who came to study under his guidance rented apartments for themselves in a nearby village.

Of course, now Linnaeus ceased to be engaged in medical practice, he was engaged only in scientific research. He described all medicinal plants known at that time and studied the effect of medicines made from them. It is interesting that these studies, which seemed to fill all his time, Linnaeus successfully combined with others. It was at this time that he invented the thermometer, using the Celsius temperature scale.

But the main business of his life, Linnaeus still considered the systematization of plants. The main work "The System of Plants" took as much as 25 years, and only in 1753 did he publish his main work.

The scientist decided to systematize the entire plant world of the Earth. At the time when Linnaeus began his work, zoology was in a period of exceptional predominance of systematics. The task that she then set herself was simply to get acquainted with all the breeds of animals living on the globe, without regard to their internal structure and to the connection of individual forms with each other; the subject of zoological writings of that time was a simple enumeration and description of all known animals.

Thus, zoology and botany of that time were mainly concerned with the study and description of species, but boundless confusion reigned in their recognition. The descriptions that the author gave of new animals or plants were usually inconsistent and inaccurate. The second main shortcoming of the then science was the lack of a more or less tolerable and accurate classification.

These basic shortcomings of systematic zoology and botany were corrected by the genius of Linnaeus. Remaining on the same ground of the study of nature, on which his predecessors and contemporaries stood, he was a powerful reformer of science. Its merit is purely methodological. He did not discover new areas of knowledge and hitherto unknown laws of nature, but he created a new method, clear, logical, and with the help of it brought light and order to where chaos and confusion reigned before him, which gave a huge impetus to science, paving the way in a powerful way for further research. This was a necessary step in science, without which further progress would not have been possible.

The scientist proposed a binary nomenclature - a system of scientific naming of plants and animals. Based on the structural features, he divided all plants into 24 classes, also highlighting separate genera and species. Each name, in his opinion, should have consisted of two words - generic and specific designations.

Despite the fact that the principle applied by him was rather artificial, it turned out to be very convenient and became generally accepted in scientific classification, retaining its significance in our time. But in order for the new nomenclature to be fruitful, it was necessary that the species that received the conditional name, at the same time, be so accurately and in detail described that they could not be confused with other species of the same genus. Linnaeus did just that: he was the first to introduce a strictly defined, precise language and a precise definition of features into science. In his work "Fundamental Botany", published in Amsterdam during his life with Cliffort and which was the result of seven years of work, the foundations of the botanical terminology that he used in describing plants are outlined.

The zoological system of Linnaeus did not play such a major role in science as the botanical one, although in some respects it was superior to it, as less artificial, but it did not represent its main advantages - convenience in determining. Linnaeus had little knowledge of anatomy.

The works of Linnaeus gave a huge impetus to the systematic botany of zoology. The developed terminology and convenient nomenclature made it easier to cope with a huge amount of material that had previously been so difficult to understand. Soon all classes of the plant and animal kingdom were systematically studied, and the number of described species increased from hour to hour.

Later, Linnaeus applied his principle to the classification of all nature, in particular, minerals and rocks. He also became the first scientist to classify humans and apes as the same group of animals, the primates. As a result of his observations, the naturalist compiled another book - "The System of Nature". He worked on it all his life, from time to time republishing his work. In total, the scientist prepared 12 editions of this work, which gradually turned from a small book into a voluminous multi-volume publication.

The last years of Linnaeus's life were overshadowed by senility and illness. He died on January 10, 1778, at the age of seventy-one.

After his death, the chair of botany at Uppsala University was given to his son, who zealously set about continuing his father's work. But in 1783 he suddenly fell ill and died at the age of forty-two. The son was not married, and with his death, the lineage of Linnaeus in the male generation ceased.