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Carl Linne, second father of botany, generally known as 

 Linnaeus, was born in 1707, the same year as Buffon and Bernard 

 de Jussieu. His father was a country minister in southern 

 Sweden. He made little progress in other studies, but early 

 displayed his love and knowledge of plants. After years of 

 struggle with poverty he went to Holland; here were published 

 the famous Systema Naturae and Genera Plantarum. At 

 thirty-five he became professor of botany in Upsala, the chief 

 university of Sweden. Linnaeus was the first to adopt uniformly 

 the binomial nomenclature for plants and animals, a reform 

 almost at once generally adopted. By his "sexual system" 

 plants are arranged simply according to the number of stamens 

 and pistils, thus providing ready pigeon-holes for new species. 

 His Species Plantarum (1753) is generally taken as the starting 

 point for specific names. "There are as many species as were 

 created in the beginning," Linnaeus says. Later in life he sug- 

 gested that perhaps the genera only had been formed "in the 

 beginning." He recognized his system as artificial; it was but a 

 thread of Ariadne, to help him find his way in the labyrinth of 

 facts. "A natural classification," he writes in the Philosophia 

 Botanica, "is the first and last aim of systematic botany. I have 

 long sought but have not been able to perfect it ; I shall seek it as 

 long as I live," The vegetable kingdom includes seven "famil- 

 ies": fungi, algae, mosses, ferns, . grasses, palms and plants. 

 He then proposed sixty-seven " natural orders " (a few ending in 

 -aceae, others in -ales). He does not describe them, but names 

 their genera. "I will not give my reasons for the distribution 

 of natural orders," he said to a pupil. "You or some other 

 person after twenty or fifty years will discover them and see 

 that I was right." 



During the next hundred years a great number of works were 

 published on the Linnaean system, especially in Germany and 

 England. 



In France the system was never established. "Why should a 

 Linnaeus persuade us to call a dog Canis familiaris? " said Buffon. 

 Adanson, in his Families des Plantes also attacked Linnaeus; 



