October 2007 Newsletter Vol. 36 No. 4
Linnaeus Lives! In Philadelphia!
Karen Reeds recounts how curating Come into a New World: Linnaeus & America for the Linnaeus tercentenary at the American Swedish Historical Museum pushed her into the 18th century and brought Linnaeus to a modern audience.
Like the Swedish Museum itself, the exhibition was deeply rooted in the local history of Sweden’s little-known colony in the Delaware Valley. At the 2002 New Sweden Conference, a historian from Linnaeus’s hometown, Uppsala, casually asked the American Swedish Historical Museum’s (ASHM) director, Richard Waldron, what he had planned for the Linnaeus tercentenary. Waldron improvised the promise of an exhibition and then went around the corner and recruited me to be its guest curator. He thought I qualified because I had just given a show-and-tell about early Swedish settlers’ uses of American medicinal plants, based on the reports by Linnaeus’s emissary, Pehr Kalm; and because three years earlier I had mounted an exhibition about New Jersey’s medical heritage that had also touched on Kalm’s Travels into North America.
What Waldron did not know was that the Kalm talk was new ground for me. I considered myself primarily a historian of pre-Linnaean European botany and medicine, and for decades I had avoided working on Linnaeus or American science. It was time to move up into the 18th century!
Choosing a theme for the exhibition was easy: the museum’s name and mission suggested a focus on Linnaeus’s connections to North America. Pehr Kalm had served as his professor’s most direct, personal link to the New World, and particularly to the Philadelphia region: it was quite possible that Kalm had botanized on the land where the museum now stands. A line from Kalm’s Travels about his first moments in America provided the exhibition’s title. And Linnaeus’s American pet, the raccoon Sjupp, made an engaging icon for the show.
The choice was a fruitful one. Although Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) was fascinated by the natural history of North America, surprisingly little had been written about this aspect of his work. Philadelphia, as a center of colonial science, was rich in collections that we could use to showcase not only the two-way exchange of information between Linnaeus and his American correspondents, but also the broader implications of Linnaean ideas for America.
Thanks to a “We the People” consultation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we were able to gather Linnaeus experts, historians, biologists, exhibition designers, and museum professionals from Europe and Philadelphia at the museum in 2004 for a weekend of brainstorming about the exhibition and share information about tercentenary plans and archives in Sweden and England. Their generosity, advice, and networks proved invaluable. We were particularly lucky to capture the interest of a world-class design team, Alusiv, Inc., who stuck with the project even after funding problems forced the exhibition to be scaled down drastically.
The NEH meeting helped define the structure of the exhibition. After a brief introduction to Linnaeus’s accomplishments, visitors encountered the chaotic state of pre-Linnaean natural history and knowledge about North America and then the sharply contrasting orderliness of Linnaeus’s systems of classification and nomenclature. Next, visitors saw the natural world of America from two points of view: first, through the eyes of the newcomer Pehr Kalm, and then through the eyes of the colonial American scientists who eagerly seized on Linnaean tools to understand their own surroundings. The final sections dealt with Linnaeus’s concept of Homo sapiens (he invented the name) and with the ways his ideas have been used, taught, and reinterpreted up to the present.
The exhibition itself was funded by grants from Astra Zeneca, the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Prof. Robert Savage, SWEA New Jersey Chapter Inc, and the Swedish Council of America. Those grants made it possible for me to do research in London, Uppsala, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Turku (where Kalm taught after his return from America). In the National Library of Finland, it was particularly exciting to open a box of Kalm’s papers that had somehow escaped a fire in Turku and discover a watercolor of the American “chimney swallow,” drawn by a Swedish soldier in Philadelphia and labeled by Kalm just before leaving America. It is the only natural history illustration to surface from Kalm’s American visit, and our exhibition guide marks its first publication.
A key pre-Linnaean find turned up much closer to home: the herbal that the English naturalist, Rev. John Banister, had carried to Virginia in the late 17th century. For more than a hundred years, his copy of John Parkinson’s huge Theatrum Botanicum (1640) – long thought to have been lost – has instead been sitting safely but unrecognized in New Jersey’s Mount Holly Public Library and Burlington County Lyceum of History and Natural Science, just 30 miles from the Swedish Museum. It neatly dramatized the impossibility of learning New World natural history from Old World books.
The centerpiece of the exhibition was a replica of Linnaeus’s herbarium cabinet, built according to the directions in his Philosophia Botanica. Standing nearly nine feet high, the cabinet served Linnaeus and his students as a scientific instrument: its 24 shelves matched the 24 classes in Linnaeus’s system of plant classification. Visitors of all ages readily accepted our invitation to open its doors, take out sample herbarium sheets of American plants named by Linnaeus (digital images of historical specimens), read the stories of the plant collectors, and then re-shelve the pressed plants in their proper places.
We wanted visitors to understand that Linnaeus’s ideas are not simply a matter of antiquarian interest. His brash confidence that every animal, vegetable, and mineral could be known and displayed on a single organizational chart transformed natural science and science education. His system of binomial nomenclature has proven versatile enough to encompass organisms whose existence he barely suspected (bacteria, dinosaurs, fossil hominids), and scientists still feel delighted to have newly discovered species named in their honor. Biologists today look with new appreciation at his pragmatic solutions to organizing a vast body of scientific information as they bring genomics and evolutionary theory to bear on systematics and medicine: those unique Latin names have taken on a new utility in the age of search engines and DNA barcodes.
Linnaeus’s opinions about sex, religion, and race continue to arouse strong feelings in 21st century America. His “sexual system” for classifying plants was regarded as scandalous in his own time. Today I find that prudish e-mail filters are equally shocked by the terminology – even in Latin!
Linnaeus’s creationist assumptions and Darwin’s challenge to them remain live issues in America. The exhibition gave visitors a chance to read the two textbooks at the center of the Pennsylvania court case about teaching Intelligent Design in public schools, along with a copy of Judge John Jones’s 2005 decision in Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School System and a reproduction of the manuscript title page of Origin of Species.
Explaining Linnaeus’s views about humans in the small space of exhibit labels raised the most difficult issues of interpretation. His religious and scientific conviction that all human beings form a single species reverberated in Jefferson’s credo for a new nation: “All men are created equal.” At the same time, we could not ignore the fact that Linnaeus’s characterization of black Africans and his ranking of them as the last of his four geographic groups of humans were long used as a hateful “scientific” justification of slavery and racism. Few of the scientific racists or his modern critics took note, however, that he put “red” Americans first, ahead of Europeans.
In many ways, mounting this exhibition at a small museum mirrored the experience of Linnaeus, Kalm, and their American colleagues: our work was intensely local but also very much part of a global project. It has been very satisfying to join in the international celebration of the Linnaeus tercentenary and to know that we have contributed to the rapidly growing resources for research on 18th century science. The Linnaeus that emerges from these personal, institutional, and on-line collaborations is a very different figure from the “Prince of Flowers” whom the world celebrated in 1907.
The Linnaeus tercentenary continues in the Delaware Valley with the 2007 New Sweden Conference, “Carl Linnaeus, Pehr Kalm, and the Early American Scientific Community.” The conference talks and nature walks will be held in the very village that Kalm used as his base: Swedesboro, New Jersey.
For more information contact the American Swedish Historical Museum, 215-389-1776. Or visit http://www.americanswedish.org/.
Karen Reeds is the Guest Curator of Come into a New World: Linnaeus & America (15 February 2007 to 1 July 2007), American Swedish Historical Museum, Philadelphia. She is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the Princeton Research Forum and National Coalition of Independent Scholars. She can be contacted at karen.reeds@verizon.net.
Image: Replica of Linnaeus’s herbarium cabinet