Page 55 - The Secret Museum
P. 55
like it went a bit wrong. One has been cut in half, so I could see the irritant he put
inside it to make the mussel form the pearl. It looks like a seed in the middle of the
pearl.
Linnaeus sold his secret in 1762 to a Swedish merchant called Peter Bagge who
got a permit from the king to make pearls, but even though he paid 6,000 dalars (more
than £93,000 today) for a monopoly on the right to make pearls, he never got around
to making any. Linnaeus once said that he wished he’d become famous for creating
these pearls rather than for classifying nature. After taking a good look, we put them
back in their box, in their drawer, and closed it shut.
Next, we took down some books. The first was a green leatherbound book with
‘LINNAEUS’ embossed in gold letters on the front. It was his journal from a trip he
made to Lapland. It is filled with his notes, in his slanting handwriting, on the people,
flowers and creatures of Lapland, and wonderful – if not that competent – drawings
of local life.
We turned the pages and saw his charming sketches of ploughs, fish, skis, insects,
coral, local Laplanders, embroidery on Sami clothing and tents. There were
drawings of how the Lapps slept, ate, dried fish and even the kinds of games they
played (throwing balls and a game that looks like chess). There is a beautiful sketch
of a crane fly, and an interesting one of Andromeda being threatened by a sea monster
beside one of an Andromeda plant being threatened by a newt. I really liked his
drawing of an owlet and one of a Sami baby wrapped up cosily.
He tells how to cure chilblains with roasted reindeer cheese, how to fix a broken
pot by boiling it in milk and how to make thread from reindeer hooves. He described
the singing in Lapland: ‘No Laplander can sing, but instead of singing utters a noise
resembling the barking of dogs.’
The journal was published as Iter Laponicum but it was brilliant to see the real
thing, written in Lapland. Linnaeus brought it back to his home in Uppsala, along with
a drum and a Lapp costume. There is a painting of him wearing it holding the drum
and his Linnaea borealis plant, in the library upstairs at the Linnean Society.
I’d been told that Linnaeus was the first person to grow a banana in Europe, so I
asked Lynda whether there was anything banana related in the collection. She opened
up a book called Musa Cliffortiana Florens Hartecampi, all about that first banana.
It was grown in the garden of Linnaeus’s friend George Clifford, in Holland. Musa is
the genus for banana; it was named from musz, which is the Arabic word for
‘banana’; or perhaps for the nine Greek muses themselves. Inside the book is a fold-
out drawing of the fruiting banana plant. It ends with a question: ‘Will my banana
grow for years?’
Lynda then showed me Linnaeus’s most famous work, Systema Naturae.
Published in 1735, it’s a history of all the living things he knew about at the time,
divided up according to his sexual system for classifying them. He caused a bit of a