Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know all Life
Jason Roberts (Quercus, £25)
THIS absorbing and lucidly written account of how we came to name and categorise our birds, beasts and plants begins with two men, both born in 1707 to families of modest, if not straitened, circumstances, who developed a passion for natural history.
Carl Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae in 1735, when man’s understanding of the natural world was still shaped by the Bible, Aristotle and a jumble of notions and beliefs, including the Great Chain of Being, a pyramid of perfection that ranked the world from slugs and weeds at the bottom to angels and God at the top.
Linnaeus’s revolution began with the insight that flowers might be separated into identifiable categories by their sexual characteristics, mammals by the arrangement of their teeth. He set up the rule that each plant or animal could be identified by two names, in Latin: the first identifying to the category, the second to
