Carolus Linnaeus
Carolus Linnaeus’s real name was Carl Von Linné and he was born on May 23rd 1707 in Råshult, Smâland, Sweden to Nils Linnaeus the comminister, afterwards pastor of the parish, and Christina Brodersonia, the daughter of the previous incumbent. Carolus was sent to primary school at Wexiö at the age of 10 and when he was 17 he passed to the gymnasium. When he was 19 people from his school were recommending to his father to apprentice him to a tailor or shoemaker. Dr. Rothman saved him from this fate though, Dr. Rothman was a physician in the town who expressed the belief that Carolus would yet distinguish himself in medicine and natural history, and who further instructed Carolus in physiology. While going to University he met Dr. Olaf Celsius, professor of theology, at the time working at his Hierobotanicon, which saw the lightly nearly twenty years later. Dr. Olaf Celsius took Carolus in and taught him many things during the time they lived together. He died 71 years later on January 10th 1778 in Uppsala, Sweden; the cause of his death is unknown. While Carolus was alive he was a botanist and explorer.
Carolus’s system for classifying plants was the first system that was widely used and accepted. In 1732, Carolus went on a trip to a largely unexplored area in the northern region of Scandinavia known as Lapland. While on the trip he saw and felt more of the need for there to be a classifying system for plants and took it upon himself to complete the task which became his lifework. He used earlier research by the German botanist Rudolph Camerius to divide all flowering plants into 23 classes. The 23 classes he divided them into where all based on the number, length, and arrangement of the stamens and pistils. He did have a 24th class but it only included the non-flowering plants, such as mosses. Carolus had also begun to start a system for classifying animals and plants when Dutch botanist Jan Fredrick Gronovius paid for a publication of Carolus’s Systema Naturae. Carolus introduced the binomial system to biology and it became his greatest contribution to biology, a system that most could understand since it consisted of two parts based on Latin word roots.