The father of taxonomy was nearly apprenticed to a cobbler
His schoolmasters told his father the boy would never be a scholar, and Carl Linnaeus was almost sent off to learn shoemaking. He kept skipping lessons to hunt plants instead. A local doctor took him in, and the truant went on to give every living thing a two-part scientific name.
Linnaeus was born in 1707 at Råshult in Småland, southern Sweden, the first child of a Lutheran curate who loved gardening. His father was the first of the family to take a fixed surname, choosing a Latin form of the Swedish word for a huge lime tree growing on the homestead. Carl disliked his first tutor, who he later said was better at snuffing out talent than nurturing it, and at grammar school in Växjö he spent more time in the fields than at his books. His headmaster noticed the botany habit and introduced him to Johan Rothman, the provincial doctor, who taught him plant classification and persuaded his dismayed father that medicine might suit him.
At Uppsala his 1729 essay on the sex lives of plants caught the eye of Olof Rudbeck the Younger, who had the second-year student lecturing by 1730; audiences of 300 were common. In May 1732, just short of 25, he set off for Lapland on foot and horseback, pressing plants and questioning the reindeer-herding Sami. Over six months and more than 2,000 kilometres around the Gulf of Bothnia he found about 100 plants new to science, even in that sparse region. The resulting Flora Lapponica, covering 534 species, is counted the first modern-style regional flora.
The trip also sparked an idea about animals. Spotting a horse's jawbone by the road, he mused that knowing each animal's teeth and teats might yield a natural arrangement of all four-footed creatures. At that stage he still described species with long Latin phrases, not the two-word names he would formalise later.
He published the first Systema Naturae while living in the Netherlands from 1735 to 1738, then became Uppsala's professor of medicine and botany. Ennobled in 1761 as Carl von Linné, he died in 1778 among Europe's most celebrated scientists. Botanists still cite him with a single letter, L., and he serves as the type specimen for Homo sapiens.
Source: Carl Linnaeus
