Systema Naturae

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Systema Naturae

The book Systema Naturae was one of the major works of the Swedish

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic countries on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden has land borders with Norway to the west and Finland to the northeast, and it is connected to Denmark by the ?resund Bridge in the south....
botanist, zoologist and physician Carolus Linnaeus

Carolus Linnaeus

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The book Systema Naturae was one of the major works of the Swedish

Sweden

Carolus Linnaeus

Carl Linnaeus was a Sweden botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern alpha taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology....
. 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 published the Systema Naturae in the year 1735, during his stay in the Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a country that is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is a parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy. The Netherlands is located in North-West Europe, and bordered by the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east....
. As customary for the scientific literature of its day, the book was published in Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
. In it, he outlines his ideas for the hierarchical classification of the natural world, dividing it into the animal kingdom

Animal

Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the Kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life....
(Regnum animale), the plant kingdom (Regnum vegetabile) and the "mineral kingdom

Mineral

A mineral is a naturally occurring solid formed through Geology processes that has a characteristic chemical composition, a highly ordered atomic structure, and specific physical properties....
" (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 stamen

Stamen

The stamen is the male organ of a flower. Each stamen generally has a stalk called the filament , and, on top of the filament, an anther , and pollen sacs, called sporangium....
s were treated in the same group. Linnaeus believed that he was classifying God

God

God is a deity in theism and deism religions and other belief systems, representing either the sole deity in monotheism, or a principal deity in polytheism....
's creation and was not trying to express evolutionary relationships. The classification of animals was more natural. For instance, human

Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
s were for the first time placed together with other primate

Primate

A primate is a member of the biological order Primates , the group that contains lemurs, the Aye-aye, Lorisidaes, galagos, tarsiers, monkeys, and apes, with the last category including humans....
s (as Anthropomorpha).

In view of the popularity of the work Linnaeus kept publishing new and ever expanding editions, 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 whale

Whale

Whales are marine mammals of order Cetacea which are neither dolphinsmembers, in other words, of the families Oceanic dolphin or River dolphinnor porpoises....
s were erroneously classified as fish

Fish

A fish is any marine biology vertebrate animal that is typically ectothermic , covered with scale , and equipped with two sets of paired fins and several unpaired fins....
es; in the 10th edition, published in 1758, the whale

Whale

Whales are marine mammals of order Cetacea which are neither dolphinsmembers, in other words, of the families Oceanic dolphin or River dolphinnor porpoises....
s were moved to the mammal

Mammal

Mammals are a class of vertebrate animals whose name is derived from their distinctive feature, mammary glands, with which they feed their young....
s. In this same edition he introduced two part names (see binomen

Binomen

In ICZN, a binomen, or binominal name, is the name of a species. The term was introduced in 1953.A binomen is a name consisting of two names: generic name and specific name....
) for animal species, something he had done for plant species (see binary name) in the 1753 publication of Species Plantarum
Species Plantarum

Species Plantarum was first published in 1753, as a two-volume work by Carl Linnaeus. Its prime importance is perhaps that it is the primary starting point of botanical nomenclature as it exists today....
.

External links

online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library
online at gallica
online at Google Book Search
Google Book Search

Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans, converts to text using optical character recognition, and stores in its digital database....