What Linnaeus Saw by Karen Magnuson Beil

Author:Karen Magnuson Beil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Norton Young Readers

Herbarium specimen sheet from the Natural History Museum, London. Linnaeus named this umbellate plant Artedia squamata for his late friend Peter Artedi.

INNOVATIONS IN PAPER TECHNOLOGY

Linnaeus had to sort through and describe the constant rush of incoming plants, animals, and information. Despite taking quick power naps to refresh himself, the workload was stressful. He told a friend, “I feel like a tired horse who does not feel like obeying the whip.” Over the years, he simplified his task by coming up with several paper technologies which changed the way botanists kept track of information and specimens. While they look obvious now, at the time they were revolutionary.

His first innovation was the use of loose herbarium sheets. For years, Linnaeus and his fellow botanists had glued dried plant specimens, two or three to a page, then bound them together as books. The problem was that newly found plants could not be added into books that were already bound, and the order in which the plants were arranged couldn’t be changed. New specimens required new books.

Using isinglass, a paste made by boiling out a gooey substance from the swim bladders of freshwater sturgeon, Linnaeus began placing one specimen on a sheet. Only one. And he left the pages loose.

A second innovation was his cabinets. In order to organize all those loose sheets of paper, Linnaeus hired a local woodworker to build three eight-foot-tall cupboards, 16 inches wide by 12 inches deep, with folding doors. Each cupboard could hold 6,000 loose sheets of paper, which meant 6,000 dried plant specimens. Linnaeus could relocate a plant to make room for the steady arrival of new discoveries at any place within the system.

Later in life, feeling overwhelmed by “information overload,” Linnaeus came up with a more flexible way of looking at large masses of data. His third innovation was to cut paper into little slips 3 x 5 inches (7.5 x 13 cm). At the top of each slip, he wrote a genus name, then briefly described one species. He could file these, easily change their order, or spread them out on a table to analyze relationships. Today we call these slips of paper index cards.

In a time- and paper-saving innovation, Linnaeus began in 1751 to use the alchemical symbols that he had learned as a child in a new way—to indicate gender in plants. These symbols were letters from an ancient alphabet that medieval alchemists had adoped to abbreviate the names of metals.

For male, Linnaeus used the symbol for iron, the hard metal that alchemists associated metaphorically with Mars, the god of war and agriculture.

For female, he used the symbol for copper, the softer metal they associated with Venus, the goddess of love and fertility.

He was the first to use these symbols in the biological sciences.

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