Page 53 - The Secret Museum

‘YOU COULD SAY THIS ENTIRE room is a hidden treasure,’ said the curator of the

Linnean Society as the door swung open to their basement storage facility. She
flicked the lights on to reveal a wood-panelled room lined with 1,600 books and
drawers filled with 14,000 plants, 3,198 insects and 1,564 shells, which were the
private collection of Carl Linnaeus, the man who named the natural world.

Carl von Linné (1707–78), who was born Carl Linnaeus, was a Swedish botanist.
He standardized the system of scientifically naming plants with two Latin names, the
genus (e.g. Ginkgo), followed by the species (e.g. biloba). This is called binomial
nomenclature, and it is now used internationally for all plants and animals, even us

humans. We are in the genus Homo and our species is sapiens, hence Homo sapiens,
‘the wise man’. Linnaeus came up with our name.

It’s a really clever system if you think about it, because anyone around the world
can understand what plant or creature you are talking about. It’s essential for
botanists, zoologists and museum curators caring for collections of specimens.

When a new species is discovered, scientists must explain to other scientists what
it is and what it looks like. So the first thing they do is pick one member of the
species as a holotype, or ‘type’, specimen. This is the example of the new species
that will forever define it and is often the first example of the species found. Most of

these ‘types’ are in museums around the world; thousands of them are in this room
because Linnaeus gave them their scientific names.

There is not, as yet, a type for Homo sapiens. A palaeontologist named Edward
Drinker Cope (1840–97) asked for the job in his will, but he turned out to have
syphilis, so was struck off the list. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been proposed. Many
say it ought to be Linnaeus, as he came up with the idea. His body is well preserved
in the cathedral in Uppsala, Sweden, so there is a chance of this happening yet.

The specimens housed at the Linnean Society used to be in Uppsala, in Linnaeus’s
home, where he lived with his family. When Linnaeus died, Joseph Banks (1747–
1820) – the director of Kew Gardens and a passionate botanist – tried to buy the

collection, but in the end a young student of his, James Edward Smith, bought it with
money he borrowed from his father, and shipped the whole lot to London, where he
founded the Linnean Society.

This is the cave of riches that I went to see. It is just inside the entrance to the
Royal Academy of Arts. I met the librarian, Lynda Brooks, in the library, and we
ventured downstairs to the basement, where the collection lives. She turned a key that
opened a door into Linnaeus’s world.

The entire room smells like a lovely combination of old books and wood polish.
The top shelves are filled with books Linnaeus wrote himself, and his reference

books. The lower drawers and shelves are filled with thousands of insect, shell and
plant specimens collected by him and by his ‘apostles’ – his students, who collected
around the world for him. These men of science would also act as pastors, priests or