Linnaeus Publishes Systema Naturae

January 1735

A twenty-eight-year-old Swedish botanist named Carl Linnaeus published a slim folio in Leiden that sorted every known plant and animal into kingdom, class, order, genus, and species. The system was elegant, binomial, and Latin. Nature, for the first time, had an address book that everyone could read. Each subsequent edition grew vastly, until the twelfth contained the naming of the entire known living world.