Linné and taxonomy in Japan: On the 300th anniversary of his birth

I am very grateful to the Linnean Society of London for the kind invitation it extended to me to participate in the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl von Linn e. When, in 1980, I was elected as a foreign member of the Society, I felt I did not really deserve the honour, but it has given me great encouragement as I have tried to continue my research, nding time between my of cial duties. Today, I would like to speak in memory of Carl von Linn e, and address the question of how European scholarship has developed in Japan, touching upon the work of people like Carl Peter Thunberg, Linn e’s disciple who stayed in Japan for a year as a doctor for the Dutch Trading House and later published Flora Japonica. Carl von Linn e, who was born in Sweden in 1707, published in 1735, when he was 28 years old, the rst edition of Systema Naturae, in which he outlined a new system of classi cation. According to this system, the plant kingdom was classi ed into 24 classes based mainly on the number of stamens, the animal kingdom was classi ed into six classes { quadrupeds, birds, amphibians, shes, insects and worms { and the mineral kingdom was classi ed into three classes { rocks, minerals and mined material. Each class was divided into several orders, and examples of some genera were given for each order. Linn e rmly believed that nature had been created by God in an orderly and systematic manner, and he aimed to discover the order of nature so that he could classify and name all things created by God and thus complete the system of nature. However, in Linn e’s system, which classi ed plants mainly on the basis of the number of stamens, species with di erent numbers of stamens belonged to di erent classes, even when their other characteristics were very similar, while species with the same number of stamens belonged to the same class, even when their other characteristics were very di erent. This led to the idea that the classi cation of organisms should be based on a more comprehensive evaluation of all their characteristics. This idea gained increasing support, and Linn e’s classi cation system was eventually replaced by systems based on phylogeny. The binomial nomenclature proposed by Linn e, however, became the basis of the scienti c names of animals and plants, which are commonly used in the world today, not only by people in academia but also by the general public. In the binomial nomenclature, the scienti c name of a species consists of a combination of the generic name and an epithet denoting the species. Before Linn e established the binomial nomenclature, scienti c names consisted of the species’ generic name and a description of the characteristics of that particular species which di erentiated it from the other species in the same genus. Therefore, when there were many species in one genus, the description di erentiating one species from the others became highly detailed and very long, making scienti c names dif cult to use. To solve this inconvenience, Linn e proposed a new nomenclature, excluding the description of characteristics from the scienti c name and simplifying it to a combination of a generic name and an epithet only, with the description of the species to be noted separately. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature and the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature stipulate that, when more than one scienti c name exists for a particular species, the oldest scienti c name shall be adopted. It is also stipulated that, for spermatophytes and pteridophytes, the scienti c names in the rst edition of Linn e’s Species Plantarum, published in 1753, shall be recognised as the This article was rst published in 2008 as a chapter of Special Issue No. 8 of The Linnean ISSN 0950-1096 and is reprinted by kind permission of The Linnean Society of London.