Page 54 - The Secret Museum

doctors whilst on collecting expeditions.

We began with the plants. Linnaeus pressed each one carefully, described it and

gave it a scientific name, and then stored it away. Later, these were parcelled up, so
each plant is now a brown paper package tied up with green string, each one stacked
upon another. We unwrapped one package and, inside, we found the type specimen
for Delphinium. Two hundred and fifty years after Linnaeus named it Delphinium
(after the Latin for ‘dolphin’, because of the shape its flower makes as it opens, like a
dolphin leaping out of the waves), it is still a vivid blue colour because it has been
kept in storage, out of the light. This is just one in his library of thousands of plants.

We also unwrapped what was for Linnaeus a very special flower, Linnaea

borealis, which was named after him and became his signature flower. If ever you
see a painting of him, look for the flower. He usually has it draped through his
fingers. When alive, it is pink, and its delicate petals carpet the floor of woodland in
Sweden. At night, the pink burns in the darkness. The type specimen in the archive
has turned brown over the centuries, unlike the delphinium. Pink and red flowers lose
their vibrancy more quickly than blue and yellow ones.

Scientific names aren’t just for scientists. They tell stories. Buttercups are in the
Ranunculus genus. They often grow near water and ranunculus is the Late Latin

word for ‘little frog’, a species also found near the water. Water lilies are in the
genus Nymphaea, after the water nymphs in Greek myths. The laurel Kalmia was
named by Linnaeus for his Swedish student Pehr Kalm; the black mangrove
Avicennia he named for the Persian physician Avicenna. He also reused classical
names: Acer (maples), Quercus (oaks). The only plant Linnaeus named after a female
body part is a blue vine popularly called a ‘butterfly pea’; he gave it the genus
Clitoria. If you look up your favourite plant, it is bound to have a good story hiding

in its scientific name.

The same goes for animals. Some animals Linnaeus named descriptively, like the
southern flying squirrel, Glaucomys volans (‘the white mouse that flies’); in others,
he added things that made him smile. He named the blue whale – the largest animal
that has ever lived on earth – Balaenoptera musculus. In Latin, musculus means
‘little mouse’. He named the house mouse at the same time: Mus musculus. There are
no mammals in the basement room of the Linnean Society – though some do still
survive in Sweden – but there are a lot of fish pressed on to paper, their skin

flattened as if they were flowers, as well as corals, shells and insects.

There is also, in among them, a little box that contains pearls made by Linnaeus.
They are the first artificial pearls ever cultured in a mollusc. He made the pearls by
jamming a piece of limestone into a freshwater mussel, Unio pictorum (the ‘painter’s
mussel’, so called because artists would use the shallow valves to mix their
pigment), and holding it there so the mussel would create a pearl around it. Then he
put the mussel back into the river for six years, giving the pearl time to grow.

The pearls are small and roundish, apart from one elongated brown one that looks