October 2007 Newsletter Vol. 36 No. 4
Digitizing Linnaeus
Eva Nyström, research editor for the Linnaean correspondence, gives a status report on the project.
The Linnaean correspondence began its work in 1995 with the goal of publishing all available letters to and from Linnaeus. We are producing digitized pictures of the manuscripts (i.e. as facsimiles) together with summaries in English of all letters in Latin and Swedish (since more than 90% of the letters are written in these languages). In the final stage new editions of every letter will be added. Specimens of dried plants, or seeds, enclosed with the letters, will also be digitized and shown in their context. Several previously published transcriptions and translations, now unavailable in the book-market, will also be published, which will facilitate research in the editorial history of the correspondence. As well, an inventory of all letters records the names of the correspondents, the dates of the letters, place names of senders and of addressees, and the language of the letter, as well as locations of manuscripts and previous editions. Included are links to files with biographical and bibliographical information. Given Linnaeus’s large network of correspondents, the project constitutes a guide to the scientific culture of the eighteenth century as a whole.
Approximately 5,500 letters are known today, of which about 3,000 are to Linnaeus. Several years after his death, letters to Linnaeus held at his estate were purchased by the English naturalist and physician James Edward Smith, together with Linnaeus’s library, manuscripts and natural-history collections. After Smith’s death, the collection went to the Linnean Society of London. Most preserved letters to Linnaeus belong to this collection. Other letters to him are kept mostly in Swedish archives, but there are also single letters in other foreign archives. As to letters from Linnaeus, about 1,500 are kept in Swedish archives, of which the largest collection belongs to the archives of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. There is also a large collection at the Uppsala University Library and the National Archive in Stockholm. A number of letters from Linnaeus are kept in foreign archives.
Many letters are – as far as we know – lost, mostly letters from Linnaeus himself. As he made no drafts or copies, it is impossible to know how many letters he wrote. Luckily, many extant letters start by mentioning a recently received letter by its date and place name. We think we have the right to suppose no one would include this information if he had not received that particular letter, but if we can’t find it in the archives or published in some contemporary scientific journal or in some other way, we consider this letter a lost letter. We do keep a record so we can estimate how many letters – now lost – are mentioned in the correspondence. From this we presume that the final number of letters to and from Linnaeus might reach 8,000. Finally, Linnaeus did not answer all letters, so the exact balance between letters written by him and to him is unknown.
The letters are written over a period of 50 years from 1728 to 1778. The first known letter from Linnaeus is to one of his first mentors in Sweden, Kilian Stobaeus, Professor of Medicine and Natural History at the University of Lund in Scania, where Linnaeus spent a year as a student from 1727 to 1728. The letter to Stobaeus is written in the summer of 1728. The first known letter to him is from Gottfried Jacob Jaenisch, written in Hamburg 1735, when Linnaeus was on his way to Holland. The last known letter from Linnaeus is to his closest friend Abraham Bäck, physician and president of the Collegium medicum, written in December 1776, almost a year before Linnaeus died. In 1777 there are no letters from Linnaeus at all. He was ill, suffering from at least two strokes, and in the last year of his life it was impossible for him to write, or even speak. The last known letter to him is from the Italian Michelangelo Comi, written in Rome, 8 December 1778, who was apparently unaware of Linnaeus’s death, which had occurred 11 months earlier. Sometimes it is hard to know whether the last letters written to Linnaeus were addressed to him or to his son, Carl Linnaeus the Younger, who not only succeeded him as a professor, but also as a correspondent.
Between the years 1728 and 1778, thousands of letters were exchanged, in rough figures distributed over the decades as follows: in 1728 and 1729 there are only four letters. From the 1730s we have about 300 preserved letters, of which about 250 are from Linnaeus’s time abroad, i.e. 1735-1738. In the next decade there is an increase to about 700 letters. In the period 1750-1759 the figure doubles to about 1,500 letters. In the 1760s there is an increase to 1,650, which makes this decade the most dense as to frequency of letters. In the final decade, letters decrease to about 950. Then there are about 400 undated letters, which in most cases, can be placed in their right chronological order.
Linnaeus’s correspondence network is often said to be a global one, and of course in many ways it was. It extended from the very north of Sweden to Cape Town in South Africa, from the North-American colonies to China in East Asia, and within the European context from Dublin to Moscow, from Uppsala to Montpellier, Padua and Rome and from Madrid or Paris to Vienna. Linnaeus’s network covered not only the learned world as a whole, but also the whole world, which makes it unique. In the great Swiss naturalist Albrecht von Haller’s correspondence network for example, which comprises 17,000 letters, not only were there no correspondents from America, Africa, or Asia, but the correspondence itself was concentrated in central Europe. We must keep in mind, though, that most letters to Linnaeus were written in Europe, and that the majority of letters from Africa, Asia, and from the American continent were from his Swedish disciples. At Linnaeus’s request, they wrote to him and sent him specimens.
In order of frequency, most of the letters to Linnaeus from European countries came from German (Göttingen most frequently) and Dutch cities and towns (Leiden most frequently, followed by Amsterdam) with about 400 letters each. From French (Montpellier most frequently, then Paris) and British cities and towns (London most frequently) there are about 300 letters each. Next in order of frequency come other Nordic countries, Russia, Italy, Austria and Central Europe, Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland. From the American continent, Asia, and Africa there are about 50 letters each. There are also many letters with no place-name at all, though most of these can be located. All in all, the foreign correspondence dominated. The number of registered correspondents, slightly more than 600, including institutions such as scientific societies, also amount to more foreigners than Swedes, fully 400.
The project aims to have most of the summaries published in the end of this year. Little by little the digitized images from archives and libraries, for example the Linnean society of London, will reach the site. The project will continue also next year.
Contact Eva Nyström at eva.nystrom@idehist.uu.se.
Secretary of the Swedish Linnaeus Society
http://www.linnaeus.se.
For further information please visit the project’s Web site: http://www.linnaeus.c18.net.
Image: Carl Linnaeus to Giovanni Antonio Scopoli (1723-1788), Italian naturalist and physician, 15 August 1761, The Linnaean correspondence, linnaeus.c18.net, letter L2943.