First published more than thirty years ago (in 1970), Wilfrid Blunt’s thorough biography of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) has been made into a scrumptious coffee-table book. The elder brother of Christopher (merchant banker, authority on medieval coins) and Anthony (Poussin expert, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, and Soviet spy), Wilfrid, who taught at Eton, was a writer without frontiers, characteristically crowding his extensive knowledge into biographies of representative figures from a diversity of cultures.
Blunt has the British sense of fair-play and a reticent, decent distance from so accomplished a life as that of Linnaeus, paying great attention to the people Linnaeus knew in England, Holland, Germany, and Sweden. A later book by Sten Lindroth (Sweden’s leading historian of science), Gunnar Erickson, Gunnar Broberg, and Tore Frangsmyr, Linnaeus: The Man and His Work (California, 1983), gives us a more complex and embarrassing Linnaeus as bogus doctor, egomaniac, loose-cannon theorist, and hopelessly amateurish scientist who “most probably delayed the development of modern biology, and not just in the Nordic countries” (Lindroth).
He doubted the biblical account of the universe, as well as other parts of Scripture.
Linnaeus’s enduring accomplishment was to perfect a naming system in Latin, universally comprehensible, for all living things. My tomcat Ejnar is Felis catus, of the family Felidae; Felis is his genus, catus (or domesticus) is his species. If he were (as he thinks he is) a tiger, he would be Felis tigris. There are animals who
