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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Linnaeus Carl. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
Carl Linnaeus, the famous Swedish naturalist, was born in Sweden, in the village of Rozgult, on May 23, 1707. He was of an humble family, his ancestors were simple peasants; father, Nils Linneus, was a poor country priest. The year after the birth of his son, he received a more profitable parish in Stenbroghult, where Carl Linnaeus spent his entire childhood up to the age of ten. My father was a great lover of flowers and gardening; in the picturesque Stenbroghult he planted a garden, which soon became the first in the whole province. This garden and his father's studies, of course, played a significant role in the spiritual development of the future founder of scientific botany. The boy was given a special corner in the garden, several beds, where he was considered a complete master; they were called so - "Karl's garden". When the boy was ten years old, he was sent to an elementary school in the town of Vexie. The gifted child's schoolwork was going badly; he continued to engage in botany with enthusiasm, and the preparation of lessons was tiring for him. The father was about to take the young man from the gymnasium, but the case pushed him into contact with the local doctor Rotman. He was a good friend of the head of the school where Linnaeus began his studies, and from him he knew about the exceptional talents of the boy. At Rotman, the classes of the "underachieving" schoolboy went better. The doctor began to gradually introduce him to medicine and even - contrary to the teachers' reviews - made him fall in love with Latin. After graduating from high school, Karl enters Lund University, but soon moves from there to one of the most prestigious universities in Sweden - Uppsala. Linnaeus was only 23 years old when the professor of botany Olof Celsius took him to be his assistant, after which he himself, while still a student. Carl began teaching at the university. Traveling around Lapland became very important for the young scientist. Linnaeus walked almost 700 kilometers, collected significant collections, and as a result published his first book, Flora of Lapland. In the spring of 1735, Linnaeus arrived in Holland, in Amsterdam. In the small university town of Garderwick, he passed the exam and on June 24 he defended his dissertation on a medical topic - about fever, which he had written back in Sweden. The immediate goal of his journey was reached, but Charles remained. He remained, fortunately for himself and for science: the rich and highly cultured Holland served as the cradle for his ardent creative activity and his resounding fame. One of his new friends, Dr. Gronov, suggested that he publish some work; then Linnaeus compiled and printed the first draft of his famous work, which laid the foundation for systematic zoology and botany in the modern sense. This was the first edition of his "Systema naturae", containing for the time being only 14 pages of a huge format, on which brief descriptions of minerals, plants and animals were grouped in the form of tables. With this edition, a series of rapid scientific successes of Linnaeus begins. In his new works, published in 1736-1737, his main and most fruitful ideas were already contained in a more or less finished form - a system of generic and specific names, improved terminology, an artificial system of the plant kingdom. At this time, he received a brilliant offer to become the personal physician of George Cliffort with a salary of 1000 guilders and a full allowance. Cliffort was one of the directors of the East India Company (which then prospered and filled Holland with wealth) and mayor of the city of Amsterdam. And most importantly, Cliffort was a passionate gardener, a lover of botany and the natural sciences in general. In his estate Gartekampe, near Harlem, there was a garden famous in Holland, in which, regardless of costs and tirelessly, he was engaged in the cultivation and acclimatization of foreign plants - plants of Southern Europe, Asia, Africa, America. At the garden, he had both herbariums and a rich botanical library. All this contributed to the scientific work of Linnaeus. Despite the successes that surrounded Linnaeus in Holland, little by little he began to pull home. In 1738, he returned to his homeland and faced unexpected problems. He, accustomed for three years of living abroad to universal respect, friendship and signs of attention of the most prominent and famous people, at home, in his homeland, was just a doctor without a job, without practice and without money, and no one cared about his scholarship. . So Linnaeus the botanist gave way to Linnaeus the physician, and his favorite activities were abandoned for a while. However, already in 1739, the Swedish Diet assigned him one hundred ducats of annual maintenance with the obligation to teach botany and mineralogy. At the same time, he was given the title of "royal botanist". In the same year, he received a position as Admiralty doctor in Stockholm: this position opened up a wide scope for his medical activities. Finally, he found an opportunity to marry, and on June 26, 1739, a five-year-delayed wedding took place. Alas, as is often the case with people of outstanding talent, his wife was the exact opposite of her husband. An ill-mannered, rude and quarrelsome woman, without intellectual interests, she valued only the material side in the brilliant activity of her husband; she was a housewife, a cook wife. In economic matters, she held power in the house and in this respect had a bad influence on her husband, developing in him a tendency to avarice. There was a lot of sadness in their relationship in the family. Linnaeus had one son and several daughters; the mother loved her daughters, and they grew up under her influence as uneducated and petty girls of a bourgeois family. To her son, a gifted boy, the mother had a strange antipathy, pursued him in every possible way and tried to turn her father against him. The latter, however, she did not succeed: Linnaeus loved his son and passionately developed in him those inclinations for which he himself suffered so much in childhood. In a short period of his life in Stockholm, Linnaeus took part in the founding of the Stockholm Academy of Sciences. It originated as a private association of several individuals, and the original number of its full members was only six. At its very first meeting, Linnaeus was appointed president by lot. In 1742, Linnaeus's dream came true and he became a professor of botany at his native university. The botanical department in Uppsala acquired under Linnaeus an extraordinary brilliance, which she never had either before or after. The rest of his life was spent in this city almost without a break. He occupied the department for more than thirty years and left it only shortly before his death. His financial position becomes strong; he has the good fortune to see the complete triumph of his scientific ideas, the rapid spread and universal recognition of his teachings. The name of Linnaeus was considered among the first names of that time: people like Rousseau treated him with respect. External successes and honors rained down on him from all sides. In that age - the age of enlightened absolutism and patrons - scientists were in fashion, and Linnaeus was one of those advanced minds of the last century, on which the courtesies of sovereigns rained down. The scientist bought himself a small estate near Uppsala Gammarba, where he spent the summer in the last 15 years of his life. Foreigners who came to study under his guidance rented apartments for themselves in a nearby village. Of course, now Linnaeus ceased to be engaged in medical practice, he was engaged only in scientific research. He described all medicinal plants known at that time and studied the effect of medicines made from them. It is interesting that these studies, which seemed to fill all his time, Linnaeus successfully combined with others. It was at this time that he invented the thermometer, using the Celsius temperature scale. But the main business of his life, Linnaeus still considered the systematization of plants. The main work "The System of Plants" took as much as 25 years, and only in 1753 did he publish his main work. The scientist decided to systematize the entire plant world of the Earth. At the time when Linnaeus began his work, zoology was in a period of exceptional predominance of systematics. The task that she then set herself was simply to get acquainted with all the breeds of animals living on the globe, without regard to their internal structure and to the connection of individual forms with each other; the subject of zoological writings of that time was a simple enumeration and description of all known animals. Thus, zoology and botany of that time were mainly concerned with the study and description of species, but boundless confusion reigned in their recognition. The descriptions that the author gave of new animals or plants were usually inconsistent and inaccurate. The second main shortcoming of the then science was the lack of a more or less tolerable and accurate classification. These basic shortcomings of systematic zoology and botany were corrected by the genius of Linnaeus. Remaining on the same ground of the study of nature, on which his predecessors and contemporaries stood, he was a powerful reformer of science. Its merit is purely methodological. He did not discover new areas of knowledge and hitherto unknown laws of nature, but he created a new method, clear, logical, and with the help of it brought light and order to where chaos and confusion reigned before him, which gave a huge impetus to science, paving the way in a powerful way for further research. This was a necessary step in science, without which further progress would not have been possible. The scientist proposed a binary nomenclature - a system of scientific naming of plants and animals. Based on the structural features, he divided all plants into 24 classes, also highlighting separate genera and species. Each name, in his opinion, should have consisted of two words - generic and specific designations. Despite the fact that the principle applied by him was rather artificial, it turned out to be very convenient and became generally accepted in scientific classification, retaining its significance in our time. But in order for the new nomenclature to be fruitful, it was necessary that the species that received the conditional name, at the same time, be so accurately and in detail described that they could not be confused with other species of the same genus. Linnaeus did just that: he was the first to introduce a strictly defined, precise language and a precise definition of features into science. In his work "Fundamental Botany", published in Amsterdam during his life with Cliffort and which was the result of seven years of work, the foundations of the botanical terminology that he used in describing plants are outlined. The zoological system of Linnaeus did not play such a major role in science as the botanical one, although in some respects it was superior to it, as less artificial, but it did not represent its main advantages - convenience in determining. Linnaeus had little knowledge of anatomy. The works of Linnaeus gave a huge impetus to the systematic botany of zoology. The developed terminology and convenient nomenclature made it easier to cope with a huge amount of material that had previously been so difficult to understand. Soon all classes of the plant and animal kingdom were systematically studied, and the number of described species increased from hour to hour. Later, Linnaeus applied his principle to the classification of all nature, in particular, minerals and rocks. He also became the first scientist to classify humans and apes as the same group of animals, the primates. As a result of his observations, the naturalist compiled another book - "The System of Nature". He worked on it all his life, from time to time republishing his work. In total, the scientist prepared 12 editions of this work, which gradually turned from a small book into a voluminous multi-volume publication. The last years of Linnaeus's life were overshadowed by senility and illness. He died on January 10, 1778, at the age of seventy-one. After his death, the chair of botany at Uppsala University was given to his son, who zealously set about continuing his father's work. But in 1783 he suddenly fell ill and died at the age of forty-two. The son was not married, and with his death, the lineage of Linnaeus in the male generation ceased. Author: Samin D.K.
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