Saturday Rave: Carl Linnaeus the Younger.

Carl Linnaeus is famous throughout the world for developing a scientific system to describe all the variety of life on Earth.

He was a great and much-respected man, and from his work flowed a river of discovery that led to Darwin and beyond, right down to us in the present day.

Now Carl Linnaeus had a son, and to the resentment of many Carl Linnaeus had this son made a professor even though the son had passed none of the usual exams. The young man followed his father in making a career classifying the natural world, though the son is really only known nowadays for his book Supplementum Plantarum systematis vegetabilium, which consists mainly of an edited version of some of the work his father and his father's colleagues had already done.

In fact we should probably not have heard of this son at all, except that the elder Carl Linnaeus's fatherly pride and optimism led him to name the baby after himself.

Or was it pessimism?

Because I rather think it's mostly the case that Carl Linnaeus the Younger's life only looks a little bit of a failure because of his famous name.

Word To Use Today: ancestry. This word comes from the Latin antecēdere, one who goes before.