What Linnaeus Saw Read online

  WHAT

  LINNAEUS

  SAW

  A Scientist’s Quest

  to Name Every Living Thing

  KAREN

  MAGNUSON BEIL

  Norton Young Readers

  An Imprint of W.W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  For Kim and Pat

  [Here is] what all children who wander in the woods know, without even realizing that they know it: the living world is not some random mess, but an array of clusters of more and less similar things.

  —CAROL KAESUK YOON, NAMING NATURE

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: Sjupp’s Story

  1. Not One Pumpkin

  2. Every Growing Thing

  3. Into the Arctic!

  4. Dragon with Seven Heads

  5. Can Bananas Grow in Holland?

  6. Nature’s Blueprint

  7. Last Name, First Name

  8. The Most Controversial Plant

  9. Human vs. Animal

  10. Student Explorers

  11. The Professor

  TIMELINE

  GLOSSARY OF BOTANICAL AND SCIENTIFIC TERMS

  NOTES

  SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Carl Linnaeus

  (pronounced lin-NAY-us)

  May 23, 1707–January 10, 1778

  Carl Linnaeus scratched his name into the window of his room during his school year at Lund University in 1728-1729. (The line above the “n” doubles the letter below.) When the house was demolished years later, these glass fragments were discovered and preserved.

  Introduction

  SJUPP’S STORY

  If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost too.

  —CARL LINNAEUS, PHILOSOPHIA BOTANICA (THE SCIENCE OF BOTANY), 1751

  The strange animal poked around the study, sniffing, searching. Carl Linnaeus watched for clues. Where did this little fellow fit in the animal kingdom? People had their theories. Was it a type of bear or badger? A canine? A cat? Or something else entirely? Nobody knew. At his desk, Linnaeus pored through books by other scientists for descriptions of the animal, its habitats, behaviors, economic uses, and names. One naturalist called the animal Vulpi affinis americana, linking it to the American red fox. Linnaeus examined a published drawing of another animal—smaller, thinner, and with a longer tail. He realized they were related, but that creature turned out to be a coati from South America.

  Linnaeus’s animal was not native to Sweden; in fact, it was not native to any place in Europe. It had been brought over on a ship from North America. Most likely it was trapped by settlers along the Delaware River, where there once had been a small Swedish colony. The animal briefly lived the high life in the King’s royal garden in Stockholm. Then, sometime in 1746 or 1747, Crown Prince Adolf Fredrik gave the creature to Linnaeus, the thirty-nine-year-old world-renowned scientist at Uppsala University. The prince had one royal request: figure out what it is.

  Other unusual animals would live in the university’s gardens—monkeys, parrots, peacocks—but this one quickly became the family’s darling and lived in the house. They called it Sjupp, pronounced “shewp.”

  Having Sjupp living right there in the house made him hard to ignore and easy to observe, perfect for the busy professor, who noted:

  — back feet are longer and broader than the front,

  — walks on hind feet like a man or bear,

  — stands somewhat larger than a cat, almost as big as a hare, but shorter and closer to the ground, and with a rounded back, like a bear

  — hears poorly with small ears and requires a shout to get his attention,

  — sees poorly,

  — possesses keen senses of smell and touch. Locates even the smallest crumb tossed to him, not by seeing it but by sniffing and by patting the ground with his soft paws.

  Sjupp liked to laze on his stomach and stretch out his legs. He was not interested in the shriveled-up plants from Sri Lanka that Linnaeus studied incessantly that summer; he’d rather have a ripe cherry. But as soon as Professor Linnaeus knocked the tobacco out of his pipe and tossed the cold pipe to the floor, Sjupp rose up on his hind legs and hustled over to pick it up. Squatting on his haunches, he gently rolled the smooth pipe stem between his paws. He could do this for hours.

  He was a pickpocket and a thief, always on the wrong side of mischief. With slender flexible fingers and despite the inconvenience of not having thumbs, he managed to help himself to tasty treats. A sweet cake that Mrs. Linnaeus had hidden on top of the tall walnut cupboard. Eggs from nests in the yard. Terrified birds in the university’s garden. Raisins and almonds right out of students’ pockets.

  This pampered pet ate richly—sugary cakes, meats, bread, porridge, apples, pears, lingonberries, cherries, strawberries, bird bones, raisins, crayfish, and eggs, anything except raw or boiled fish, or foods prepared with vinegar such as sauerkraut.

  Sjupp wandered through the professor’s upstairs library. Books, shells, rocks, bones, and packets of seeds folded like Japanese origami sat here and there. Hundreds of pressed plants glued onto paper were stacked on shelves labeled I to XXIV in three towering gray cabinets. Potted plants crowded the windowsill.

  Through the open window, where birds flew in and out, the professor had a commanding view of the medical school’s teaching garden. Sjupp caught a whiff from the window and let out a horrible squawk—a warning that the gardener was working below. On their first meeting, Sjupp had climbed the gardener’s leg to investigate, but the man panicked and shook him off roughly. Now whenever Sjupp smelled the man’s scent, he screamed like an angry seagull.

  The Uppsala University teaching garden. Along the back was an orangery. This eighteenth-century greenhouse, precursor of today’s all-glass structures, had large windows and was heated for growing delicate warm-climate plants, such as citrus trees. To the left of the garden gate were stables, a coach house, farm sheds, a henhouse, brewing house, and servants’ quarters. To the right stood the two-story home of the medical professor, where the Linnaeus family lived.

  Linnaeus watched, amused by the antics, fascinated by the behaviors. Nature enthralled him both scientifically and emotionally. He made detailed notes for his eventual report to the prince. The animal was friendly with children and dogs that he knew; he rolled onto his back and let the children pull his fur, but when they lost interest and tried to walk away he hung onto their feet and badgered them to keep playing. As “obstinate as a knife grinder,” the professor wrote.

  The children—Carl, age six, named for his father, and Lisa Stina, four—played with Sjupp endlessly. So did the college students who poured in and out of the family’s house. Students wanting to get close enough to pet this rare New World animal bribed him with raisins. If anyone made the mistake of trying to pick him up or lead him on a rope, he’d lie on the floor, flailing his legs defiantly. He’d bare his teeth and claws and growl like a bear.

  When Linnaeus offered him an egg in the garden, Sjupp would roll it carefully between his paws, nibble a little hole, then suck out the contents. Any hen that ventured too close was a goner. He’d bite off its head, drink the blood, and leave the carcass behind. One day Linnaeus was distressed to find Sjupp enjoying a meal of an impressively feathered peacock. If Linnaeus dangled him upside down by the tail to coerce him to release his prey, Sjupp clenched his teeth, renewing his hold with the force of an iron trap. Only a pig’s-bristle broom could scare him off.

  In September 1747, a new semester was beginning, and the Linnaeus fam
ily’s yellow stucco house on Black Creek Gate bustled with the commotion of students. Rather than gathering in the university’s formal lecture hall, they often met for plant demonstrations and private classes at their professor’s home, where his natural history collections and medical garden were close at hand to illustrate points and settle debates. The large upper-story room was frequently so crowded that students had to sandwich into the hallway or listen from the stairs. Wherever they were, Sjupp had plenty to do checking all those pockets for snacks.

  One night after the family had gone to bed, the nocturnal Sjupp went wandering. Instead of roaming the quiet house as he normally did until midnight, he found a way outside. The next morning, Linnaeus, his wife, children, and students called and searched for Sjupp.

  Several days later they found his mangled body.

  Sjupp had climbed the fence into another yard where, Linnaeus concluded, a dog had attacked and killed him.

  Now to fulfill his promise to the Crown Prince, there was one last step.

  Dr. Linnaeus needed to conduct a dissection of this animal that he had been so fond of. He slid a scalpel into Sjupp’s fur. Just under the skin, he found a layer of fat two fingers thick. Beneath that, the omentum, the transparent membrane holding the stomach and other abdominal organs, was crosshatched “like a spider’s web” with thin white ribbons of fat.

  Linnaeus’s notes describe sizes and shapes using comparisons but with no standard measurements—the fat was two fingers thick, the heart was the size of a large plum, the stomach no bigger than a hen’s egg. The stomach’s smallness surprised him given Sjupp’s ability to pack away a big plate of food in only an hour.

  He described the liver, gallbladder, kidneys, pancreas, and spleen. The intestines were held by a transparent membrane called a mesentery which, like the omentum, was crisscrossed with a net of thin veins of fat. He marveled at the neatly defined blood vessels on the heart. He described the canine teeth, molars, and incisors, and the thick, strong muscles of the mouth.

  Besides the obvious injuries from Sjupp’s fatal fight with the dog, Linnaeus saw three abnormalities. First, the eyes were as round as marbles. Since eyeballs with normal vision are oval-shaped, this excessive curvature explained why Sjupp had been so nearsighted. Second, his left eyeball was dried out and crusty like a husk, indicating to Linnaeus that Sjupp had been blind in that eye. Third, he found abscesses in the lungs starting to discharge pus. He realized then that even if Sjupp had avoided doing deadly battle with the dog, he would not have lived to old age. Antibiotics would not be discovered for another two centuries, so there was little available to treat the infection.

  Linnaeus delivered his report to colleagues and the Crown Prince at a meeting of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He had determined that this animal was a member of the bear family because of his shape, his sticking-up hair, the slender s-curved bone in his penis, and his vocalizations. Other bearlike traits included grasping objects with his front paws and occasionally walking long distances on his hind legs.

  In North America, Swedish colonists called this animal an ispan, which was their interpretation of the word espan, from an Algonquin language spoken by the Lenape people living along the Delaware River. It meant “the one who scratches to get into things.” The colonists called the animal’s pelt a sjupp, derived from ausup, another native word for the animal. Trappers sold the tails for fashionable striped scarves and the pelts for coats and winter hats which were popular among Swedish farmers. The settlers also ate its meat. Linnaeus’s friend Peter Collinson, a Quaker merchant and avid amateur naturalist in London, raved that, when raised on dumplings and sugar, its meat was “really fine eating,” even better than lamb.

  Linnaeus apparently had not heard of arakun, another version of the word used by Algonquin speakers a little farther to the south—or, as the Jamestown colonists thought they heard it, “a raccoon.”

  Seven years earlier, Linnaeus had named Sjupp’s species Ursus cauda elongata, a Latin phrase meaning “long-tailed bear.” At the time, he had not seen the species in person and had to rely on other people’s descriptions. Now his close daily observations of Sjupp and the dissection convinced him that the name was correct. However, names assigned by humans change as scientific discoveries are made. The year after Sjupp was killed, Linnaeus’s student Pehr Kalm was exploring North America. When Kalm said he’d observed these animals washing their food, his teacher responded by changing its name to Ursus lotor, Latin for “washing bear.”

  A watercolor sketch of Sjupp painted by student Lars Alstrin. It still hangs in Linnaeus’s summer house at Hammarby, outside Uppsala.

  Beyond the high fence where Sjupp had escaped, and south of Uppsala, boats sailed in and out of Stockholm harbor on Sweden’s east coast along the Baltic Sea. On Sweden’s west coast, tall-masted ships jockeyed for dock space in Göteborg’s big harbor on the North Sea. Beyond it stretched the vast Atlantic Ocean.

  Every day, explorers set sail from Europe. Their countries were small and their limited natural resources overused, so Europeans charged around the globe in a rush to explore and exploit lands on other continents. While they were at it, they were eager to discover and collect plants, animals, and minerals—valuable natural resources—for kings, queens, and wealthy merchants and collectors back home. Everyone was hungry for the exotic. More ships arriving in European ports meant more crates and barrels of tea from India, coffee beans and cacao from the Americas, silks, porcelain, and spices from China—expensive imports, unknown plants and animals from the farthest parts of the world.

  Meanwhile, excited scientists scrambled to name and claim the curious specimens as they came ashore. Each used his own methods and terminology. Every specimen was called by so many names, in so many languages, that nobody knew what was what. Scientists were overwhelmed.

  Carl Linnaeus liked things to be orderly. Even as a boy, he’d been a habitual list-maker. As a pastor’s son who had already become the world’s most famous naturalist, he was thrilled to see nature’s astounding variety flooding into nearby ports, waiting to be examined, described, named, and put in order.

  He had a big dream—maybe an impossible dream—to name and catalog every living thing. In fact, he felt he had been chosen by God to reveal the Creator’s original plan for life.

  He was in a hurry. It was a big job for one lifetime. He wanted to organize the entire natural world: every plant, every mineral, every creature great and small, including the lovable raisin-robber who once felt for crumbs beneath his desk.

  The curiosity that drove Carl Linnaeus started early—with the plants in his father’s garden.

  RACCOON UPDATE

  Science is always tentative, a set of mysteries to be solved, moving from chaos to order, and making the unknown knowable. As new information comes in, old theories fall.

  Pehr Kalm believed that raccoons dunked their food in water to wash it. Later, naturalists assumed this was because they lacked salivary glands. Today, scientists know that raccoons do have salivary glands, as well as highly developed nerves in their forepaws: handling food in water softens the skin on a raccoon’s paws, making it even more sensitive and capable of finding and distinguishing food.

  Linnaeus was not wrong about the animal being related to bears, even though his assumptions were limited to physical traits that he could see. Using DNA research, twentieth-century scientists traced the animal’s genetic evolution and found that raccoons and bears shared a common ancestor.

  1

  NOT ONE PUMPKIN

  . . . though we be confined to one spot, one corner of the earth, we may examine the great and various stores of knowledge, and therein behold the immense domains of nature.

  —CARL LINNAEUS, HIS FIRST LECTURE AS A PROFESSOR, “AN ORATION CONCERNING THE NECESSITY OF TRAVELING IN ONE’S OWN COUNTRY,” 1741

  Ever since he was old enough to walk and pull weeds, Carl had helped his father in the garden. Now sixteen years old, at home for summer vacation i
n 1723, he kept his eye on a pumpkin plant. His father had great hopes for it.

  Flowers and fruit trees stretched out in dizzying variety, more than 220 different kinds. The garden belonged to the parsonage, which stood next to the church in Stenbrohult, Sweden, where Carl’s family lived. His father, Nils Linnaeus, was the pastor, and Carl himself was studying to join the clergy.

  The land sloped toward a lake, the opposite bank rising to a hilly ridge. At a time when only grand estates had lavish ornamental gardens, this yard alongside the simple wooden parsonage was bursting with flowers and exotic trees, as well as practical “kitchen plants” to feed the family. Pastor Linnaeus’s garden was said to be one of the best-stocked in this corner of Sweden.

  Carl sketched this map of Stenbrohult showing the parsonage where he grew up, his father’s church (a), gardens (b), and Lake Möckeln (c). His father grew fruit trees including apples, pears, cherries, and plums; gooseberries, raspberries, and musk strawberries; vegetables such as turnips, artichokes, horseradish, spinach, and asparagus; flowers including tulips, daffodils, violets, and salvia; and rare trees including mulberry, fig, and dwarf almond.

  Carl was happy to spend his summer here. At school, the boys—and even the masters—called him the Little Botanist. This garden was Carl’s favorite place to be, a place where he routinely saw things that astonished him. And made him wonder . . .

  The pumpkin plant—with its green vines, hairy leaves, and bright yellow flowers—looked as expected. Up close, with its prickly leaves pushed aside, he would have seen two kinds of flowers growing on the plant. One kind grew on a long, skinny stem. Inside its petals, several thread-like filaments clumped together as one, coated with a powdery yellow dust. The second kind of flower sat on a shorter, thicker stem with a berry-shaped bulge at its base. Inside that flower stood a short stalk with a sticky, bumpy crown on top. Nils taught his son the Latin names for these structures. Even there in the Swedish farm country, they knew that this North American plant typically had two different flowers, but they had no idea why those flowers were different or what their functions were.