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The Man Who Organized Nature: Gunnar Broberg (trans. Anna Paterson) ****

There are some individuals in the history of science who everyone with a vague interest in the subject knows existed, but who remain shadowy figures, known for what they did but with little more to go on. One such was Carl von Linné, the Swedish scientist known far better by his Latinised surname Linnaeus.

This is no lightweight study at 410 pages with another 44 pages of notes and sources. It's arguable it does go into rather more detail than the typical popular science reader would want - but it is generally readable and certainly puts Linnaeus into an appropriate context. In fact, I was surprised just how much I wanted to come back and read more, as I often find in biographies that after a while I get fed up and would prefer to have more of the science and less of the life.

It might seem a little surprising that the one thing Linnaeus is universally known for gets relatively scant coverage. His binomial nomenclature - the species names such as Homo sapiens or Solanum tuberosum (potatoes) that are used to identify each living thing - only get a handful of mentions in the index, popping up almost in passing in the main text. This is because the two main drivers of the structure are Linnaeus's life and his publications. He produced a vast output, much of which wasn't directly linked to his series of editions of the key work giving the structure that lay behind that nomenclature, Systema Naturae (though this does get two chapters pretty much to itself) and it's interesting to see how much does go beyond this central piece of work.

I particularly liked the occasional one-page asides (with accompanying illustration), such as the 'desirable tea bush' where we discover that Linnaeus wrote 'Thée and coffe are novelties, always to be drunk hot so that by drinking we wash out our stomachs as they are truly rendered lax thereby: these concoctions bring nothing good.' Later apparently he changed his mind and became something of an addict, attempting to bring tea-growing to Sweden.

I don't deny that the book was sometimes a little hard going. There is so much detail here that it can sometimes be hard for the key elements and particularly any scientific implications to shine through. Even so, this is a striking addition to the list of key scientific biographies.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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