His interest in botany, though, impressed a physician from his town and he was sent to study at the university of Lund, transferring to Uppsala after a year.
During this time Linnaeus became convinced that in the stamens and pistils of flowers lay the basis for the classification of plants, and he wrote a short work on the subject that earned him the postion of adjunct professor.
In the Academy of Sciences at Uppsala financed his expedition to explore Lapland, then virtually unknown. The result of this was the Flora Laponica published in Thereafter Linnaeus moved to the continent. He did not remain a practicing doctor for long, but was appointed professor of medicine at Uppsala University in , eventually becoming rector of the school similar to a Dean in During his tenure, he was responsible for maintaining the university's Botanical Garden, a task he carried out with enthusiasm, arranging the plants according to his own Linnaean classification.
In the same year Linnaeus finished his doctorate, he published a brief pamphlet that would eventually revolutionize the fields of biology and scientific taxonomy. He kept revising and expanding it for the rest of his life. It proposed a radical new approach to the ordering and classification of plants and animals. His system was hierarchically ranked, meaning that organisms were grouped into successively larger groups based on morphological traits that is, physical attributes.
At the broadest level, the classification system was divided into three broad kingdoms: animals, plants and minerals the mineral designation was subsequently dropped. These categories were further subdivided into increasingly specific designations, which included "classes," "orders," "genera," and "species. Related: Ancient mystery creature that defied classification is Earth's oldest animal. Scientific classification during the 18th century was chaotic, Beil said.
There were several different classification schemes in vogue and new specimens were being discovered all the time, especially from areas outside Europe that were the focus of European colonization. These specimens were scrutinized by scientists from different countries, each of whom used his own method and terminology. This led to many of the same species acquiring several different names, frequently in different languages.
And often the names would be interminably long, complex and unwieldy — essentially a long list of the organisms' attributes so that a single organism might be identified using upwards of ten or more words. In her book, Beil gives the example of asparagus , which, prior to the Linnaean system, was classified as Asparagus caule inermi fruticoso, folis aciformibus perennantibus mucronatis termis aequalibus. In short, the classification schemes in existence before Linnaeus' system were confusing and idiosyncratic and there was little effort, if any, to systematize the methods.
Systema Naturae grew out of practical reasons, Beil said. He had a hyper-organized mind and he was an obsessive list-maker, so I think that helped him 'clear the desktop of science' by bringing order to taxonomy. At its most basic level, the Linnaean system assigns each unique species of organism two names, hence the identification of the system as a binomial two-named classification. Although similar two-named systems had been used in the past, Beil said, they had never been used in any systematic manner, nor had they been used consistently.
Linnaeus combined two terms, genus and species, and used this combination to identify each particular organism. The species designation, a term he borrowed from the English naturalist and parson John Ray, indicates the most basic unit of classification, traditionally defined as organisms capable of interbreeding. The genus designation gens is Latin for "tribe" ranks above species and designates the larger group of related organisms.
For example, a coyote Canis latrans is a different species from a wolf Canis lupus , but both belong to the same genus, Canis. This genus, in turn, could then be related to the higher-order ranks, such as order Carnivora , class Mammalia and so on, all the way up to the highest rank, the kingdom ranking Animalia. Related: The 10 weirdest medical cases in the animal kingdom.
He studied medicine and science at the University of Lund and Uppsala University. At this time, botany was an important part of medical training, as doctors had to be familiar with many types of plant and their medicinal properties in order to treat their patients.
But memorising scientific plant names was extremely difficult — each one was known by a long description in Latin. In the s, Linneaus undertook expeditions to Lapland and central Sweden, before finishing his medical degree at the University of Harderwijk in the Netherlands. While enrolled at the University of Leiden he published his famous Systema Naturae — a new way of classifying living organisms.
Over the years, Linnaeus revised this classification system, which soon became a huge, multivolume work. It grouped all species into higher categories, known as taxa: genera, orders, classes and kingdoms.
0コメント