Free Dry Storeroom No. 1 by Richard Fortey

robes was actually painted in Amsterdam a few years later, but it does seem that, like Darwin on
The Beagle,
a youthful adventure set him on the course to greatness. His classification of plants was based on such features as counting the number of stamens—it was a
sexual
system. Some young ladies were forbidden to study it because it might bring a blush to their delicate cheeks. Linnaeus’ mission to classify knew no bounds: he moved from plants to animals.
Deus crevait, Linnaeus disposuit
(God created, Linnaeus organized) served as his motto. He distributed his binomials far and wide. The Botanical Garden he laid out in Uppsala, with neat beds arranged according to his system, is still in good order. It ought to be one of the holy places for scientists to visit. Even if the simple sexual system has now been superseded, the legacy of the names lives on. Linnaeus’ higher and more inclusive levels of organizing organisms into Order and Class and Kingdom are also still used as part of the hierarchy of the system. The labels on the cupboards that I passed in my peripatetic passage around the Natural History Museum were mostly family names, and the family originated as a unit of classification slightly later. *3 Inside a given cupboard the curator might have placed a number of species belonging to several genera, all embraced by the family whose name is on the door. It is, if you like, a sophisticated filing system, and if you have millions of specimens, the necessity of a filing system that works is patently obvious. I will leave until later in this chapter the question of what the filing system actually
means
in terms of evolution and ancestry, since Linnaeus lived and worked in a pre-Darwinian world, although I should say that like all taxonomists he used the features of the plant or animal concerned as the basis for his classification. The convention of using Latin and Greek for names was easy work for the early taxonomists. Most of them had been educated in the classics, and they knew their way around mythology and literature. Quite soon a whole dictionary of gods, goddesses, nymphs and satyrs had been recruited to label the natural world, mostly as generic names.
Daphne
is a flowering shrub,
Daphnia
is a water flea; Daphne herself was a nymph pursued by Apollo, and changed into a bay tree, as always seemed to be happening in those days. The bay tree itself is
Laurus nobilis,
“noble” because the aromatic leaves were used to crown the brows of heroes.
    Like
nobilis,
species names often were, and still are, epithets describing some salient feature of the animal or plant in question. A very beautiful plant might be the species
magnifica,
a very ugly one the species
horrida.
The specific names can be much more complicated, produced by splicing several Latin words together, so that a species with bright green leaves might be
viridifolia,
or one with leaves resembling the skin of a crocodile
crocodilifolia;
this complexity is fortunate, since a very large number of names are needed to accommodate all the beetles. It is necessary for the describer to have at least some knowledge of the classical languages because of the rule that genera have gender—masculine, feminine or neuter—and the species name should therefore agree in gender with that of its genus. The suffix on a genus
-us
is masculine and requires a matching
-us
on the species. The suffix
-a
is feminine, so that a commonly cultivated shrub originating from South America is
Fuchsia magellanica
and not
Fuchsia magellanicus; -um
is a neutral ending. Incidentally,
Fuchsia
is named after a famous herbalist, Leonhard Fuchs, who illustrated plants most decoratively two centuries before Linnaeus, and although Fuchs was evidently male, the genus named for him is female. This paradoxical practice is very common in botany: the well-known names
Forsythia, Buddleia
and
Sequoia
are comparable cases. To add a little Gormenghast to the nomenclatural mixture, Fuchsia (not