Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

Copyright © 2024 by Jason Roberts

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Hardback ISBN 9781984855206

Ebook ISBN 9781984855213

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Ella Laytham

Cover illustration: Armando Veve

Art direction: Greg Mollica

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Contents

Introduction Savants

Prelude The Mask and the Veil

Part I The Great Chain of Being

1. Of the Linden Tree

2. A Course in Starvation

3. The Salt-Keeper’s Son

4. Vegetable Lambs and Barnacle Trees

5. Several Bridegrooms, Several Brides

6. The Greater Gift of Patience

7. Now in Blame, Now in Honor

8. The Seven-Headed Hydra of Hamburg

9. An Abridgment of the World Entire

10. Loathsome Harlotry

11. The Quarrel of the Universals

Part II This Prodigious Multitude

12. Goldfish for the Queen

13. Covering Myself in Dust and Ashes

14. The Only Prize Available

15. Durable and Even Eternal

16. Baobab-zu-zu

17. So Many New and Unknown Parts

18. Governed by Laws, Governed by Whim

19. A General Prototype

20. Breaking the Lens

21. My Cold Years

22. The Price of Time

Part III God’s Registrar

23. Germinal, Floreal, Thermidor, Messidor

24. Transformism and Catastrophism

25. Platypus

26. Laughably Like Mine

27. The Rhymes of the Universe

28. Most Human of Humans

29. A Large Web or Rather a Network

Acknowledgments

For Your Exploration

Notes and Sources

Bibliography

Index

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Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon

Introduction

Savants

Objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate names. Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science.

—Linnaeus

The true and only science is the knowledge of facts.

—Buffon

For much of the eighteenth century, two men raced each other to complete a comprehensive accounting of all life on Earth. At stake was not just scholarly immortality but the very nature of our relationship to nature—the concepts and principles we use to comprehend the living world. Their monumental works, entitled Histoire Naturelle and Systema Naturae, were far more than catalogues. They were embodiments of very different worldviews, attempting to substantiate those worldviews by fitting each piece of life’s puzzle into a cohesive whole.

The task consumed their lifetimes. Both began believing that the Earth could not possibly hold more than a few thousand species, but as the decades passed, their grand compendiums remained vastly short of completion. The surprise of life’s profusion, of its unexpected diversity and nuance, led them to develop even more starkly divergent views on the environment, on humanity’s role in shaping the fate of our planet, and on humanity itself.

They were exact contemporaries, and polar opposites. Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish doctor with a diploma-mill medical degree and a flair for self-promotion, who trumpeted that nobody has been a greater botanist or zoologist while anonymously publishing rave reviews of his own work. Georges-Louis de Buffon, the gentleman keeper of France’s royal garden, disdained contemporary glory as a vain and deceitful phantom, despite being far more famous during his lifetime. Linnaeus, the anxious center of his own universe, preferred the company of student acolytes. Buffon, as renowned for his elegance as for his brilliance, cut a confident swath through the court of Versailles and the salons of Paris.

Linnaeus hewed closely to the Bible, while claiming divine inspiration for his own work. Buffon faced formal charges of blasphemy for suggesting the Earth might be older than Scripture indicated. Linnaeus thought his daughters unworthy of education, allowing them to learn only domestic skills. Buffon’s closest friendship was with a woman, an accomplished intellectual he considered in many ways his superior.

Linnaeus blithely laid the groundwork for racial pseudoscience, not only creating the categories that would later be labeled races, but assigning them fixed attributes (his Homo sapiens europaeus was inherently governed by laws, while Homo sapiens afer was governed by whim). Buffon advocated passionately against the herding of humanity into rigid categories, emphasizing instead our vast, nuanced diversity and common origin.

Their rivalry ran deep. Buffon, with magnificent hauteur, publicly pitied Linnaeus as the obsessed victim of a mania, while Linnaeus took secret glee in naming a species Buffonia after his nemesis—a plant with slender leaves, as Buffon had indeed very slender pretensions to a botanical honor. Yet both men had profoundly original minds. Both had astonishing capacities for work, pursuing their shared goal with unyielding discipline. As that goal continued to elude them, both persisted through chronic illness and bouts of staggering pain. Both attempted to raise their sons as successors, with tragic results. Both left behind legacies even more imposing than the sum total of their published works, legacies that contended for centuries. They still contend today.

Neither of them was a scientist—that term would not be coined until 1833, when the word science itself began to take on the meaning it has today. They were known in their time as savants, practitioners of a discipline that melded inquiry, philosophy, and a generous dollop of self-assumed authority. Yet many scientists of the nineteenth century eagerly claimed Linnaeus as a precursor, awarding him a posthumous fame that crowded the once-celebrated Buffon into obscurity. Gaining the upper hand during the chaos of the French Revolution and flourishing in the colonial expansionism of the Victorian era, pro-Linnaeus factions rushed not to disprove Buffon but to trivialize him, eviscerating his work while purporting to translate it. His Histoire Naturelle remained in print, but in abridged and adulterated versions that comprised near-parodies of the original.

Natural history, like human history, is written by the victors. For generations, adherents of the Linnean worldview were supremely confident of having won.

But flaws began to appear in that worldview as early as the 1860s, when Charles Darwin admitted that Buffon’s theories were laughably like mine. Attempting to reconcile Linnaeus’s rigid hierarchies with the constant change of evolution, naturalists cobbled together increasingly elaborate taxonomies that were riddled with redundancies and errors. In the twentieth century, the development of genetics and the discovery of DNA further broadened our understanding of life, making even clearer the insufficiencies of existing systematics and pointing toward alternatives. In the twenty-first century, advances such as epigenetics and genome sequencing have prompted scientists to concede the limitations of the Linnean worldview, to debate plans for its replacement, and to consider Buffon’s work and legacy anew.

This is the story of parallel lives lived on the grandest of scales, in pursuit of the core truths of our existence. The quest to know all life was an unwinnable impossibility, fueled by genius, hubris, the gleam of immortalizing fame, and the passion to simply understand—to know our world, and ourselves. There has never been a more human task.

—Jason Roberts

The heroic statue of Buffon, commissioned by King Louis XVI

Prelude

The Mask and the Veil

As journalists scrambled to estimate their numbers, some twenty thousand mourners lined the streets of Paris on the morning of April 18, 1788, jostling and craning to glimpse the funeral procession of one of the world’s most famous men. What they witnessed was parade-like in its proportions, a solemn spectacle projecting a luster rarely accorded to power, opulence, dignity, the Paris Mercury reported. Such was the influence of this famous name.

First came a crier and six bailiffs, clearing the way for a convoy of nineteen liveried servants. Then a detachment of the Paris Guard marching in lockstep, followed by a contingent of schoolchildren, sixty clergymen, thirty-six choirboys chanting dirges to the accompaniment of four bass horns, and six guards bearing torches. At last the funeral carriage hove into view, drawn by fourteen horses clad in matching black silk with silver embroideries. In its wake passed a long, somber cortege of prominent mourners: aristocrats, academics, and artists walking shoulder to shoulder. One of them—Dr. Felix Vicq-d’Azyr, personal physician to Queen Marie Antoinette—was moved by the sight of ordinary people stepping from the crowd and marching alongside them. You remember, gentlemen, he later reminisced,

that innumerable retinue of people of all ranks, from all walks of life, who followed in mourning, in the midst of a huge and dismayed crowd. A murmur of praise and regret sometimes broke the silence of the assembly. The temple to which we walked could not contain this large family of a great man.

In life, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon had held only the modest office of intendant, or keeper, of the Jardin du Roi—the King’s Garden—which despite its name was far from any royal enclave, on Paris’s working-class southern fringe. He’d begun inauspiciously, the son of a provincial tax collector in rural Burgundy, and earned no degree during his brief university studies, only a reputation for preferring dueling to studying. Yet he’d emerged as a leader of the intellectual revolution that would come to be known as the Enlightenment, a magisterial figure recognized throughout the world. Across the channel in London, Gentleman’s Magazine was mourning Buffon as the last of the four bright lamps of France to be totally extinguished, placing him in a pantheon alongside Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire. The historian Sainte-Beuve would go further, concluding that Buffon, the last to vanish of the four great men of the eighteenth century, in a sense brought that century to a close on the day of his death.

The formal eulogy, delivered by the philosopher Nicholas de Condorcet, went further still. The history of science presents only two men who by the nature of their works appear to come close to Monsieur Buffon—Aristotle and Pliny.

Both indefatigable workers like him—amazing in the immensity of their knowledge and the plans that they have conceived and executed, both respected during their lives and honored after their deaths by their countrymen—they have seen their glory survive the revolutions of opinions and of empires, survive the nations which have produced them and even the languages which they used, and they seem by their example to promise Monsieur Buffon a glory no less durable.

There was no talk of erecting a monument to the great man, as one already existed: a towering statue, secretly commissioned by a grateful King Louis XVI eleven years earlier and unveiled, much to its subject’s embarrassment, as the Jardin du Roi’s centerpiece. Bearing a fulsome inscription (All nature bows to his genius) and portraying a near-nude Buffon, the marble figure was by all accounts a remarkably accurate depiction of the man himself, who despite being seventy-one at the time of the unveiling appeared decades younger. The sculptor found little need to idealize, as Buffon had long struck observers as something of a heroic statue come to life. An advantageous height, a noble air; an imposing face, a physiognomy at once pleasant and majestic, ran Condorcet’s description in his eulogy.

Monsieur Buffon has never spoken to me of the marvels of the earth, one longtime friend admitted, without inspiring in me the thought that he is one of them.

Another monument, even more impressive, resided not in the Jardin but on bookshelves throughout the world. Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière, Buffon’s masterwork, stood at thirty-five volumes—three introductory ones on general subjects, twelve on mammals, nine on birds, five on minerals, and six supplemental volumes on miscellaneous subjects. It was, in one sense, a failure: His original plan had been to encompass the whole extent of Nature, and the entire Kingdom of Creation, but despite forty-three years of single-minded dedication he’d fallen short of properly addressing plants, amphibians, fish, mollusks, or insects.

It was a staggering achievement nonetheless. Even incomplete, the Histoire dwarfed most encyclopedias, a task made even more impressive by his laborious writing process. Buffon famously read drafts aloud to friends, asked them to paraphrase what they heard, then rewrote anything muddled or misunderstood, a process he repeated up to seventeen times for a single chapter. Good writing is good thinking, good awareness, and good execution, all at once was his dictum. This painstaking emphasis on clarity, combined with his choice of language—he wrote in contemporary French, not academic Latin—had been a key to the work’s enduring success.

To say that Histoire Naturelle was a bestseller is an understatement. Hailed as both a landmark of science and a work of literature, it was a publishing phenomenon that made Buffon the most popular nonfiction author in French history. Each new volume’s release sparked a flurry of sales and a round of public debate, and seemed poised to continue to do so. Also walking in the funeral cortege was Buffon’s handpicked successor, a young French nobleman who’d carefully trained in his mentor’s methods and distinctive style. He’d already published Volume 36 of the Histoire, on serpents and egg-bearing quadrupeds, and was preparing Volume 37, on cetaceans. The great man had passed away. The great work would go on.

That, at least, was the plan.

…

The death of Professor Carl Linnaeus, a decade before Buffon’s passing, had not been an occasion for grand public mourning. The long-retired academic was delivered to his rest on a winter evening in a plain coffin, hewn from one of the yew trees on his property, his unwashed, unshaved body wrapped within a single winding sheet. The torchbearers following the hearse were his tenants and servants. Most in attendance had walked over from nearby Uppsala University, where Linnaeus had taught medicine and botany for twenty-two years.

Many of them, students and faculty alike, knew him more by reputation than by experience. It had been fifteen years since the professor’s progressive brain disorder compelled him to abandon his appointment, five years since he had lost touch with reality, two years since he could walk or talk. The ceremony was respectful, but tinged with the awareness that the mind had failed well before the body. Linnaeus had spent his final years in a labyrinth of confusion, leafing through his greatest work without comprehending that he himself had written it.

No monuments had been erected, nor were any proposed.

Both Buffon and Linnaeus had been born in 1707. Both devoted themselves to compiling a massive work intended to capture the whole of nature, and neither had succeeded. But there the resemblance ended. Linnaeus was the foremost figure among the school of natural historians known as systematists, who prioritized naming and labeling above all other pursuits. Buffon was the leading practitioner of a more complex approach to nature—a perspective that, appropriately, he never saw the need to label. It may best be called complexism.

To Linnaeus’s mind, nature was a noun. All species remained as created during Genesis, representing an unchanging tableau. To Buffon, nature was a verb, a swirl of constant change. To Linnaeus, classification was knowledge: How could life be understood without organizing it into tidy categories? Buffon believed that to classify was to oversimplify; that while useful for practical purposes, classification ran the risk of embedding fundamental misunderstandings. Linnaeus believed that a single specimen could exemplify the species it belonged to, displaying a distinguishing essence. Buffon thought species were far more fluid, and that unknown forces connected them across an expanse of time.

Linnaeus trafficked in certainties, and congratulated himself heartily for doing so. As he described himself in one of his autobiographies (he wrote four),

God himself has guided him…. He has let him look into His secrets and let him see more of his created works than any mortal man before him. God has given him the greatest insight into natural history, greater than anyone else has enjoyed. God has been with him, wherever he has gone, and has eradicated all his enemies for him and made him a great name, as great as those of the greatest men on earth.

Buffon, in contrast, had come to believe that the only way to study nature was in a state of permanent uncertainty—a willingness to compile observations and explore connections, but to maintain a sense of wonder, an expectation of surprise. Their worldviews were fundamentally different, as illustrated by Buffon’s employment of a metaphorical mask and veil. The greatest obstacles to the advancement of human knowledge lie less in things themselves than in our manner of considering them, he wrote. Nature…carries only a veil, while we would put a mask over her face. We load her with our own prejudices, and suppose her to act and to conduct her operations even after the same fashion as ourselves.

To him, systems were masks imposed upon nature. They represented an urge to see nature as we wished it to be, not as it truly was. It was humbling to patiently observe, only occasionally catching glimpses beneath the veil, but to Buffon there was no other choice. Nature was profoundly, abundantly complex—perhaps beyond human understanding, as humans themselves were part of the equation. To sort into tidy categories was to deny life’s inherent interrelation. Nature, displayed in its full extent, presents us with an immense tableau, he wrote,

a continuous series of objects, so close and so similar that their difference would be difficult to define. This chain is not a simple thread which is only extended in length, it is a large web or rather a network, which, from interval to interval, casts branches to the side in order to unite with the networks of another order.

If the crowds and tributes on that April morning were any measure, Buffon’s complexist worldview had triumphed: Nature was a dynamic unity to be contemplated, not a static entity to be conquered. But within five years Buffon would be reviled as an enemy of progress, dismissed as a best-forgotten symbol of an irrelevant past. His earthly remains would be carelessly tumbled from the very coffin that had been solemnly borne through the streets, by scavengers stripping the coffin of scrap metal. A torch-bearing crowd would stream through the gates of his beloved Jardin, ignoring his monumental statue—its placement made it difficult to destroy—and clamoring to install an image of the man whose life’s work stood in parallel and antithesis to his own: a plaster bust, hastily obtained and painted to resemble marble, of Carl Linnaeus.

Part I

The Great Chain of Being

There is nothing more difficult to plan,

more doubtful of success,

nor more dangerous to manage

than the creation of a new system.

—

Machiavelli

A nineteenth-century depiction of Linnaeus as child botanist

One

Of the Linden Tree

The landscape of seventeenth-century Sweden was dotted with natural shrines. These were linden trees, viewed in a semi-mystical light by Swedes who associated their heart-shaped leaves and fragrant blossoms with Freyja, the Nordic goddess of love and fertility. Pregnant women visited them to gather leaves, hoping to invoke Freyja’s protection during childbirth by sleeping on pillows stuffed with them. Travelers sought shelter under their branches during storms, believing that Thor deferred to Freyja by aiming his lightning strikes elsewhere. Their silver trunks were favored sites for both romantic declarations and business negotiations, since Freyja was thought to punish anyone speaking lies beneath their boughs.

One ancient linden tree was especially revered. It grew near the border of the southern Swedish province of Småland, in a field straddling Hvittaryds and Jonsboda parishes, rising in a massive triple trunk to spread a canopy shading most of an acre. Nestled near its roots lay a cairn of piled stones, dating to the Bronze Age and thought to mark the resting place of a Viking warrior. The natives of Småland had long since declared the tree and its grounds a våarträd, a treasured landmark believed to extend its protection to all of the surrounding countryside.

For the family that owned the land, that brought both honor and a special duty of care: Våarträds were customarily left as undisturbed as possible, even when they occupied what would otherwise be productive farmland. For generations the family tended to the tree. When twigs or branches fell, they carefully gathered them up (it was bad luck to break even a single one) and placed them in neat piles atop the roots, leaving them to weather in peace. They erected a perimeter fence to protect the tree from the bunting, rubbing, and ringbarking of grazing animals, but kept a path to the trunk accessible to visitors.

The family had no name. This was common in rural Sweden, where surnames were rarely necessary; one’s lifelong presence on ancestral land served as identity enough. Most males, when required to provide one, adopted the simple patronymic of adding -son to their father’s given name, a practice that would eventually populate Sweden with a healthy percentage of Johannsons, Petersons, and Svensons. But in the fall of 1690, a sixteen-year-old named Nils made a different choice. Instead of becoming Nils Ingemarsson, he decided to commemorate his family’s tree by adopting the surname Linnaeus. It meant man of the linden tree, not in Swedish but in Latin.

The choice betrayed ambition. Nils was leaving to attend the University of Lund, 150 miles away, where Latin was the language of academic discourse. Many professional scholars adopted Latin versions of their surnames, which is why Michel de Nostredame is better known as Nostradamus, and why Nikolaj Kopernik is remembered as Nicolaus Copernicus. Assuming a latinized name in advance was a jarring, presumptuous choice in the province of Småland. But provincial life was what Nils intended to leave behind.

…

Nils Linnaeus did not stray as far from the linden tree as he had hoped. His family’s farming income was enough to send him to the university, but not enough to keep him there. He’d arrived with barely the money for a single year’s tuition, hoping to fund the rest with a combination of scholarships and part-time work. When those failed to materialize, he abandoned his education and for most of the next decade wandered through Sweden and neighboring Denmark, establishing himself nowhere and in no profession. He was by all accounts a friendly presence, a genial, outgoing soul. He was also in no particular hurry to make his way home.

He was twenty-seven when he finally returned, to familial disappointment and the challenge of finding a livelihood. Lacking the resources to set himself up as a farmer in Småland, he began studying to join the Lutheran priesthood. Two years later, the freshly ordained Reverend Linnaeus found an entry-level posting as a comminister, or auxiliary curate, in the village of Stenbrohult, a farming community on the shores of Lake Möckeln. It was only twenty miles from his birthplace and his namesake tree. In 1706, he married Christina Brodersonia, the daughter of his immediate superior, who changed her name to Christina Linnea (woman of the linden tree). On May 23, 1707, she gave birth to their first child, a son. In honor of the king of Sweden, they named him Carl.

The birth and early childhood of Carl Linnaeus is densely ornamented, with family legend and later attempts to render him a kind of secular saint, destined for green paths of glory. Apocryphal accounts hold that the boy was born with a head of snowy white hair, the mark of a skogsanda, or forest spirit, which later darkened to brown. The infant was strangely fussy and inconsolable, soothed only by his mother placing bouquets of flowers above his crib. Flowers became Carl’s first and choicest plaything, an early biographer wrote. The father took the little year-old son out with him sometimes into the garden, putting the child on the ground in the grass and leaving a little flower in his hand with which to amuse himself.

There were flowers in abundance. By now Reverend Linnaeus had succeeded his father-in-law as curate and moved his family to the rectory of Stenbrohult, where, free from the need to travel throughout the parish, he took up gardening as a hobby. The reverend’s garden took on formal proportions, encompassing several hundred floral varieties and sporting as its centerpiece a feast of flowers—a round, raised soil bed in the shape of a table, set with plantings carefully tended to look like heavily laden dishes. Shrubs, planted at table’s edge, were trimmed in topiary fashion to perform the roles of dinner guests. Young Carl is said to have spent hours in their imaginary company, and more hours still tending to a garden patch of his own nearby. According to one early biographer, the boy was for ever searching fields and woodlands in quest of flowers…. His loving mother complained that no sooner had he got a new flower than he cruelly pulled it to pieces, for the little fellow loved to penetrate, as far as it was possible, into the secrets of nature. There is even a story of young Carl being caught surreptitiously pressing flowers between the pages of the family Bible. The Bible is the Book of Life, he purportedly explained, and surely if I put the flowers between its leaves they would retain their color, the Bible keeping them alive for ever.

Such accounts, if true, were irrelevant: The boy’s profession had been fixed at birth. Just as Nils Linnaeus had replaced his father-in-law as rector of Stenbrohult, Carl was intended to succeed him, thus representing the fifth generation to occupy the hereditary pulpit that had been his mother’s dowry. Tending a garden was a hobby for the father, a respite from tending to souls. It could be his son’s hobby as well, but nothing more.

…

Carl would later pinpoint the moment his fascination became an obsession. It was on a bright spring day in 1711, not long after his fourth birthday. The weather was so beautiful that many of the citizens of Stenbrohult put aside their chores to enjoy a picnic at Möklanäs, a meadow on a promontory jutting out into Lake Möckeln. Afterward, as the crowd relaxed in the lush grass, Reverend Linnaeus volunteered to entertain by delivering an impromptu lecture on botany. The guests seated themselves on some flowery turf, Carl later recollected, as his father pulled up a few nearby specimens and "made various remarks on the names and properties of the plants, showing them the roots of the Succisa, Tormetilla, Orchides."

Even decades later, the Latin names of the random specimens rang clear in his mind. Resorting to the third person, he later described the moment:

The child paid the most uninterrupted attention to all he saw and heard, and from that hour never ceased harassing his father with questions about the name, qualities, and nature of every plant he met with; indeed, he very often asked more than his father was able to answer.

Carl’s irrepressible new curiosity led to some tense moments in the family garden. As he later admitted (again in the third person), he would ask about a plant, "but like other children, he used immediately to forget what he had learned, and especially the names of plants (italics his). Tired of repeating himself, the father gave his son an ultimatum: He would describe and name a plant, but only once. For the rest of his life, Carl Linnaeus would thank his father for two gifts: his introduction to botany, and this harshness of instruction, which honed his memory at an early age, for I afterwards retained with ease whatever I heard."

In 1717, his father deposited ten-year-old Carl at the Trivial School of Växjö, thirty miles from Stenbrohult, arranging for his room and board and admonishing him to acquire useful material for the ministry. The Trivial School was so called because it taught the three subjects of the classic academic trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. It was a rarified curriculum: The grammar was Latin and Greek, the rhetoric grounded on Aristotle, and the dialectics drawn from Socrates. Trivial schools tended to overwhelm even the most intelligent provincial youths—which, as Carl quickly discovered, led to the schoolmasters preferring stripes and punishments to admonitions and encouragements. By his second year at Växjö, Carl was slogging to his morning classes with a growing sense of dread.

He became, at best, a mediocre student. Although he would spend the bulk of his career writing in Latin, his command of that language would always be more workmanlike than elegant; even his Swedish would be ridiculed by more sophisticated colleagues. He spent the first five years mostly confined to the Trivial’s small grounds, until his upperclassman status gave him the right to venture outside the school. Then he spent hours walking alone, in the forests and fields that skirted Växjö. If he made a friend, he does not mention it in any of his four autobiographies. He does, however, record that both students and teachers were now calling him den lilla botanisten, the Little Botanist, a reference to his stature (he would never grow past five feet tall), and his growing obsession. He would return from his solitary walks with clutches of flowers and leaves, which he pressed between the pages of his books. Desperately unhappy, homesick for a Stenbrohult where Flora seems to have lavished all her beauties, as he now imagined, Carl retreated further and further into his private expertise. His father’s garden seemed unattainably distant, a post-expulsion Eden. Let the child enjoy his paradise, he would later write. It will be driven from it by care soon enough.

The demands of the school only increased in his teenage years. While he did well enough in mathematics and physics, he performed abysmally in Hebrew, metaphysics, and theology, consistently ranking as one of the school’s worst students. His mother and father, however, remained unaware that anything was wrong, and Carl did not confess his misery on his rare visits home. But by his seventh year at Växjö, the Little Botanist’s dread was tinged with desperation. He was failing—had failed—to acquire useful material for the ministry. A reckoning would come.

…

It came the following year, when Reverend Linnaeus contracted a minor but lingering illness. On his way to consult Johann Rothman, a doctor with a practice in Växjö, he decided to drop by the Trivial School for an impromptu visit. As Carl himself later recalled, his father was hoping to hear from the preceptors a very flattering account of his beloved son’s progress,

but things happened quite otherwise…. It was thought right to advise the father to put the youth an apprentice to some tailor or shoemaker, or some other manual employment, in preference to giving him a learned education for which he was evidently unfit.

The reverend could not contain his shock. A tailor or a shoemaker. It was a profound disappointment, to be sure, but also a major financial blow. The cost of boarding and schooling Carl for nine years had been a significant hardship. Now there would be more expenses to come, since Carl’s younger brother Samuel would have to be trained in his stead. More pressing was the immediate question: What to do with Carl? The school’s suggestion of apprenticing him to a trade had come too late. He was no longer a boy, but a young man of nearly twenty. It was difficult to imagine any manual tradesman taking the measure of the physically small, perpetually distracted young Carl and accepting him as an apprentice.

In the office of Dr. Rothman, an old friend, Reverend Linnaeus confessed his dismay. Rothman listened sympathetically, then confirmed that the harsh assessment was probably correct: He also served as the Trivial’s part-time physics instructor, where he’d come to know the younger Linnaeus as a slogging, unmotivated pupil. But at the same time, he’d recognized Carl’s clear intelligence and capacity for obsessive focus. Perhaps, he suggested, another scenario was possible.

At the time, botany was scarcely a profession in itself. It was the realm of the hobbyist, or the independently wealthy dilettante. There were professors who taught botany as a discipline, but as part of a medical curriculum, since knowledge of plants and their uses was a key aspect of medicine. Had Nils considered making a doctor of his son? Rothman offered to take Carl into his home and train him for one year. It would be an informal apprenticeship, but with any luck Carl would emerge prepared to attend medical school.

The proposal did not fill Nils Linnaeus’s heart with joy. Medicine held far less social cachet in Sweden than being a member of the clergy, and Carl had never evinced an interest in the subject. He feared that his daydreaming son would find work only as a military surgeon, the least-respectable member of the medical class, treating wounds on the battlefield and syphilis in the barracks. But it seemed there were no better options. Nils assented and departed for Stenbrohult, still wondering how he was going to break the news to his wife.

Released from the tedium of the Trivial, Carl proved a willing apprentice, quitting the school and moving in with his temporary master. The villagers of Växjö grew used to the sight of the Little Botanist doing his best to transform himself into the Little Physician, shadowing the doctor as he went about his rounds. But when Rothman’s year of instruction was up, Carl returned home to Stenbrohult and a strained reunion. The reverend had concealed from his wife the truth about their son’s academic failure for as long as possible, and when she did find out, the news of a hastily arranged change of profession had been no consolation. Both angry and disappointed, Christina Linnea forbade any mention of gardening and botany within the house. Yet she gave her cold consent to Carl’s attending medical school in the fall.

Carl left home on August 17, 1727. He carried with him a letter of recommendation from his former schoolmasters, technically required for registration at medical school but so disparagingly worded that he would never bother to submit it. He also carried a purse of silver Swedish dalers, a gift from a father who made it clear that, regrettably, no more funds would be forthcoming. It was enough for a year at best. After that, he’d have to improvise.

A statue of young Linnaeus, Uppsala Botanical Garden

Two

A Course in Starvation

On April

19, 1729,

in the Swedish city of Uppsala, Professor Olof Celsius disappeared into the weeds and brambles of a neglected field. Plump, dressed in black clerical robes, his face framed by a powdered wig and a prodigious goatee, the middle-aged academic cut a dignified figure, which made all the more incongruous his sudden departures into an overgrown thicket fringed by grazing cows. To casual passersby the land seemed a vacant lot, but Celsius knew its secret. It held the ruins of a garden.

Nearly a century earlier, another Uppsala professor had planted a private teaching garden here, an open-air classroom designed to give student physicians hands-on experience in identifying medically useful plants. The collection flourished for generations, growing to nearly two thousand botanical varieties (including, in a first for Sweden, a curiosity known as the potato). What had happened to the Uppsala Botanical Garden? The same thing that had happened to Uppsala itself. For centuries, Uppsala had rivaled Stockholm for the status of Sweden’s foremost city. While Stockholm was the commercial hub and seat of government, Uppsala was its cultural and religious center, the headquarters of the Swedish church, home to northern Europe’s oldest university and the coronation site of Swedish kings and queens (who traditionally maintained castles in both Stockholm and Uppsala). But the rivalry ended abruptly in 1702, when a fire of unknown origin swept through Uppsala, fed by strong winds blowing through narrow medieval streets like air through a bellows. The Great Fire reduced three-quarters of the city to smoldering ruins, bringing on an eclipse from which Uppsala would never quite recover. Instead of repairing Uppsala Castle, Sweden’s king hauled away stones from the rubble to use in his Stockholm palace.

No longer a metropolis, Uppsala rebuilt on a smaller scale. The city was still rebuilding twenty-six years later, and the old teaching garden was no one’s priority. Only a tenth of the plants had survived the fire. Now they grew mostly of their own accord, choking off pathways, twining across still-charred ground. Yet portions of the interior could be navigated, and Professor Celsius found it a fitting place to gather his thoughts. He was writing, or rather attempting to write, a book about plants.

It had seemed like a straightforward project. With a working title of Hierobotanicum, or Priestly Plants, it sought only to provide details on the 126 plants mentioned in the Old and New Testaments. But Celsius, despite being one of Sweden’s foremost biblical scholars, was mired in uncertainty. Knowing the names of those 126 plants, he’d come to realize, was not the same as identifying them.

What, for instance, was the hyssop mentioned in Leviticus, Numbers, Exodus, and Psalms? The Bible cites such a plant twelve times, but in Celsius’s time the name hyssop was attached to at least five plants: an herb, a nettle, an aquatic plant, a wildflower, and a variety of anise. Furthermore, hyssop was a transliteration from Greek; in Hebrew the plant is called ezob or ezov, which may or may not be another thing entirely. Why did it matter? The Bible specifies hyssop as a key ingredient in purifying a church, ridding a house of leprosy, preparing a corpse for burial, and properly sacrificing a red heifer. Celsius had no intention of performing these rituals, but an intriguing theme of sanitation ran through them all. Did the biblical hyssop hold disinfectant qualities, or safeguard against contagious disease? Such insights could only be determined by first deciding which, if any, of the five hyssops was the true plant in question. It was not a decision Celsius felt qualified to make.

In the ruined garden, Celsius was usually free to ponder such matters in uninterrupted solitude. But on this particular spring day, as he rounded the remnants of a path, he saw another visitor. A young man was sitting on a bench, intently scratching away in a notebook. He was small, not more than five feet tall, and so slightly built he seemed almost elfin. He wore no wig, which marked him as something less than a gentleman of means. His clothes were not only shabby but mismatched and ill-fitting, as if they’d been stolen or scrounged. A threadbare coat hung loosely on his thin shoulders. Scraps of newspaper showed through holes in his shoes.

Uppsala University was full of students of minuscule means, just barely scraping by, but this stranger seemed closer to a beggar than a scholar. Celsius drew closer and noticed the young man was not writing but drawing from life, capturing a nearby flower in crude, graceless strokes. The clear lack of artistic intent (and skill) meant the work in progress was not a still life but a field schematic. The flower was a specimen.

What are you examining? the professor asked.

The stranger answered politely. But instead of giving the plant’s Swedish name he cited a little-known technical designation, one given by the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. This was impressive. Celsius knew that the Tournefort system of plant identification was notoriously difficult to master, requiring the rote memorization of 698 distinct categories. Do you know about plants? Have you studied botany? Celsius asked. What is your name?

"Carl Linnaeus, sir."

Where are you from? he asked, although much of the answer was already apparent in the young man’s manner of speech. He spoke with the airy, unemphatic lilt of the rural provinces, in an accent thick enough to mark him of peasant stock.

Celsius started to point. Do you know the name of that plant? How about that one? The Linnaeus fellow named them each in turn. Then, on his own accord, he began identifying the weeds as well.

More than just a diligent student, then.