Make a Pond

I was born on May 23, 1707, in Stenbrohult, Sweden. My father was a pastor and also an amateur botanist. He grew many kinds of flowers in our garden. He loved spending time with me and teaching me the names and parts of the flowers. Because of this, I became very interested in plants and really enjoyed observing them. At first, I studied religion to become a pastor like my father.  But one of my teachers saw that I was very curious about plants, so he encouraged me to study pharmacy. Plants are used to make medicine, so knowing a lot about plants helped me in my pharmacy studies. Later, I studied medicine at Uppsala University. The university had a big garden full of plants, and I could study the plants I loved even more. Because I knew so much about plants, my professors asked me to teach botany—even though I was still a student!

In 1735, I wrote a very famous book called “Systema Naturae”. At first, it was only 14 pages long, but I kept adding more to it. By the time I finished, it had 2,300 pages! In this book, I divided natural into three groups: animals, plants, and minerals. I sorted animals into 6 groups and plants into 24 groups, based on their special features. My system became the basis for how we name and group living things today. I was the first person to create a naming system for all living things, called the  ① .

Scientists all around the world use these names so they can clearly understand which living thing they are talking about. The system uses two names: the ②   name and the  ③ name.

For example, the scientific name for humans is Homo sapiens. ‘Homo’ is the genus name and ‘sapiens’ is the species name. In this system, the genus and species names are written in Latin and italicized. The first letter of the genus is capitalized, while the rest are lowercase. This naming system is used globally, and the name of the person who named the species is often added, usually written as Linnaeus, my Latinized name.

If you discover living thing and give it a name, your name could appear as the person who named it! Known as the Father of Taxonomy and the Prince of Botany, who am I?  ④