9. Linné, Carl von (1707-1778).
Systema naturae per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species. -- Ed. 10., reformata. Stockholm: impensis L. Salvii, 1758-1759.
Carl von Linné, known as Linnaeus, a Swedish physician and botanist, published the first edition of his System of Nature in 1735, when he was twenty-eight years old. In this seminal work of taxonomy, he divided all of nature into three kingdoms, animal, vegetable, and mineral, and then further divided each kingdom into classes, orders, genera, and species. So a gray wolf (the species) was placed by Linnaeus in the dog genus, the carnivore order, the mammal class, and the animal kingdom. In 1735, Linnaeus managed to schematize the entire animal kingdom on a single pair of pages, with the plants on another pair. By the time of the tenth edition, on display here, the two pages of animals had grown into an entire volume, with the plants in a second volume. Also by 1758, Linnaeus had settled on a naming system, whereby every animal and plant was to be uniquely identified by its generic and specific name, used together, so the gray wolf is “officially” Canis lupus (a name it still holds). This system of binomial nomenclature, as it is now called, had an even more salutary effect on natural history than the new taxonomic system, as it enabled a field naturalist to discover, classify, and name a new species, virtually in one continuous process.