Now a lot of species from the natural world had their names changed for them by this man - but he also changed his name. Today he is mostly known as Carl Linnaeus, but this card gives him two other names, Carl Von Linne and simply Linne, and we also know that he used two others, Carolus Linnaeus and Carolus a Linne.
He was born on the 23rd of May, 1707, in Rashult, Sweden, and christened by yet another name, Carl Nilsson Linnaeus.
His father was a curate, a chief priest, who also had a name change, for he was born Nicolaus Ingmarsson, named after his own father, Ingemar, hence Ingemar`s son but joined together and not apostrostrophized. However when he went to University he changed his surname to Linnaeus, after a tree, a lime, which was the focal point of the house the family lived at.
Little Carl was not a good student but he was interested in plants, and his headmaster fostered that, sending him to a teacher at another school who was also a doctor, for at that time medicine was very much based on plants and herbs. The doctor tutored young Carl, and trained him for University, where he was known as Carolus Linnaeus. In 1728 he moved to Uppsala University, which was renowned for teaching botany and medicine, and the following year he began to work on a new classification system for plant life.
In 1732 he travelled to Lapland, thanks to a grant from the Royal Society of Sciences, which led to an encyclopaedic tome called "Flora Lapponica". Whilst he was writing that, he had a sudden thought how wonderful it would be if you could classify animals like you could plants, and this led to the publication, in 1735, of "Systeme Naturae".
As this is the first time one of these cards has been a Card of the Day it may as well host the list of all the cards for now, at least until I can sort them out. And that is proving problematical, but bear with me as I will knuckle down to this over the weekend
first series
- Montyon
- Parmentier
- L`Abbe de l`Epee
- Jouffroy
- Cuvier
- Pascal
- Jacquard - back says, wrongly "Jacquart"
- Jenner
- La Perouse - second series
- Stephenson
- Volta
- Robert Estienne - second series
- Littre
- Newton
- David Livingstone - second series /
- Galilee
- Claude Bernard
- Franklin
- Daguerre
- Frederic Sauvage - third series
- Pinel - third series
- James Watt - third series
- Haller - third series
- Ambroise Pare - third series
- Valentin Hauy
- Aloys Senefelder
- Charles Sauriac
- Aloisio Galvani
- Monge - fifth series
- Harvey - fifth series
- Bentham - fifth series
- Champion - fifth series
- Dennis Papin - fifth series