Title page of a 1760 edition of
Linnaeus's
Systema Naturae.
.png/250px-Linnaeus_-_Regnum_Animale_(1735).png)
Linnaeus's table of the Animal Kingdom
from the first edition of
Systema Naturae (1735).
The book
Systema Naturae was one of the major
works of the Swedish
botanist,
zoologist and physician Carolus
Linnaeus. The first edition was published in 1735. Its
full title is
Systema naturae per regna tria naturae, secundum
classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis,
synonymis, locis or translated: "System of nature through the
three kingdoms of nature, according to classes, orders, genera and
species, with [generic] characters, [specific] differences,
synonyms, places".
The tenth edition of this book is considered the starting point of
zoological
nomenclature.
Overview
Linnaeus,
or "Carl Von Linné" which is his full swedish name, published the
Systema Naturae in the year 1735, during his stay in the
Netherlands
. As customary for the scientific literature
of its day, the book was published in
Latin.
In it, he outlines his ideas for the hierarchical classification of
the natural world, dividing it into the
animal
kingdom (
Regnum animale), the
plant
kingdom (
Regnum vegetabile) and the "
mineral kingdom" (
Regnum lapideum).
The classification of the plant kingdom in the book was not a
natural one , but of convenience : it followed Linnaeus' new sexual
system where species with the same number of
stamens were treated in the same group. Linnaeus
believed that he was classifying
God's creation
and was not trying to express
evolutionary relationships. The classification
of animals was more natural. For instance,
humans were for the first time placed together with
other
primates (as
Anthropomorpha).
In view of the popularity of the work, Linnaeus kept publishing new
and ever expandingeditions, growing from eleven pages in the first
edition (1735) to three thousand pages in the final and thirteenth
edition (1767). Also, as the work progressed he made changes: In
the first edition
whales were classified as
fishes, following the work of Linnaeus' friend
and "father of
ichthyology"
Peter Artedi; in the 10th edition, published in
1758,
whales were moved into the
mammal class. In this same edition he introduced two
part names (see
binomen) for animal species,
something he had done for plant species (see
binary name) in the 1753 publication of
Species Plantarum.
References
External links
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
