Carl Linnaeus (May 23, 1707 - January 10, 1778) was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He received most of his higher education at Uppsala University, and began giving lectures in botany there in 1730. He lived abroad between 1735 and 1738, where he studied and also published a first edition of his Systema Naturae in which he divided flowering plants into classes ordered according to the structure of their sexual organs. He then returned to Sweden, where he became professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala. In the 1740s, he was sent on several journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants and animals. In 1749 he introduced the binomial nomenclature by which each plant was given a latin generic noun followed by a specific adjective. In the 1750s and '60s, he continued to collect and classify animals, plants, and minerals, and published several volumes. His last |