Page 56 - The Secret Museum

scandal at the time by suggesting plants had a sex life. There are so many names he

adopted which we still use today; magnolia, clematis, digitalis, jasmine, fuchsia,
salvia.

Animals are included in the Systema, written down in a table, according to the
genus Linnaeus assigned to them. If there was an animal he wasn’t sure about, he put
it in ‘Worms’. He put humans in the same box as apes, which he didn’t want to do,
but he couldn’t see a way around it. Anything he wasn’t sure actually existed he put in
a box called ‘Paradoxa’, which contains the satyr, phoenix, dragon, unicorn and
pelican. He wasn’t sure he believed in pelicans, because they were supposed to feed

their young on their own blood. He also named stones, fossils and minerals. This first
edition copy was huge, the only one that was published in such a big format. Linnaeus
used to fold it into four and carry it around with him.

There are two bookcases filled with copies of Linnaeus’s work. He had many of
his own publications bound with blank pages between printed ones so that he could
make his own notes as he reread his books and update them as he found new species.
His handwritten ideas are all over the blank pages, mostly in Latin. This room is the
only place in the world where there are so many copies of Linnaeus’s books covered

in his own annotations.

The day I visited the collection, thousands of Homo sapiens were rushing straight
past the doors of the Linnean Society to see the David Hockney exhibition. I saw it
too. Just think of all those flowers Hockney painted all over Yorkshire, some buried
under snow, others popping up into the sunlight after the winter underground, each
one with a scientific name, many of them coined by Linnaeus.

The entire collection has recently been digitized and is up on the Linnaean
Society’s website. Researchers around the world look things up regularly, leaving
the centuries old collections undisturbed in their wood-panelled room. There is a

postcard of Linnaeus in there, propped up against the books, watching over the lot.