Passion flowers

Historians of science have often neglected the eighteenth century because it lacks famous figureheads like Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin, yet this was a crucial period when science started to become established and gain prestige, writes Patricia Fara in a new book*. With their Enlightenment contemporaries, Carl Linnaeus in Sweden and Joseph Banks in Britain illustrate how scientific research was intertwined with commercial development and imperial exploitation in this crucial century. But the linked stories of Linnaeus and Banks unfolded very differently. Linnaeus clung to an older vision of imperial domination that ultimately failed as an economic and scientific experiment. In contrast, Banks emerges not as a disciple, but as the prophet of a scientific empire that came to rule the world. But in a twist of history it is the name of Linnaeus that is still known by most contemporary biologists while Banks has been lost in obscurity. Linnaeus became celebrated as one of science's great heroes because he invented a revolutionary method for labeling plants that was easy to use. By 1799, over 50 different systems were available, but Linnaeus' was the one that survived. In his Geography of Nature, he divided living organisms into different groups and subsets arranged in an orderly five-tier pattern of categories – classes, species and so forth, every plant and animal should carry its own two-part label. His scheme was enormously controversial when he first proposed it in 1732. Linnaeus decided to order plants numerically according to their reproductive organs. It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that naturalists realized that plants reproduce sexually. Linnaeus gave priority to male characteristics. His first level of ordering depends on the number of male stamens, but only the subgroups are determined by the number of female pistils. His descriptions were full of sexual analogies. " The flowers' leaves… serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity. When now the bed is so prepared, it is time for the bridegroom to embrace his beloved bride and offer his gifts, " he wrote. Critics were quick to denounce this sexual vocabulary. Linnaeus had clearly spelled out the analogies between the reproductive organs of flowers and people. " The calyx is the …