Master taxonomist.('The Compleat Naturalist')(Book Review)

Wilfred Blunt Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist. Princeton University Press, 264 pages, $35

First published more than thirty years ago (in 1970), Wilfred Blunt's thorough biography of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) 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), Wilfred, 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).

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 have only their Linnaean binomials for a name in English (e.g., boa constrictor). Philip Miller's authoritative Gardner's Dictionary began using the Linnaean nomenclature in 1768, and Peter Collinson, the dealer in plants, urged John and William Bartram (botanists to Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson) to adopt it. Louis XV ordered it (over Buffon's head) to be used at the Jardin des Plantes, insuring (after 1774) its European and American acceptance.

Medicine in eighteenth-century Sweden had not yet caught up with that of Hippocrates (died 485 B.C.). Linnaeus once put two teenage virgins in bed with a sick old man (as per I Kings 1:3 and 15), though he did suspect that microscopic "mites" were the carriers of disease, anticipating Pasteur by a century. But he believed in the phoenix and unicorns, and that swallows wintered at the bottom of ponds.

He doubted the biblical account of the ...