Carolus Linnaeus was the founder of modern scientific methods for naming plants and animals.

Botanist 1707-1778

Carolus Linnaeus was born on May 23, 1707, in Råshult, Sweden. He died on January 10, 1778. Linnaeus was the founder of the modern scientific method of naming plants and animals. He was the first person to name each living thing with two names: the genus (group) and the species (kind). It was Linnaeus who first gave humans the scientific name Homo sapiens. Linnaeus, the son of the parish pastor, showed an early love of flowers. By the age of eight he was nicknamed "the little botanist." Linnaeus studied at the universities of Lund and Uppsala. He was appointed lecturer in botany at Uppsala in 1730. Two years later, with fifty dollars given to him by the Royal Society of Science, he explored Lapland, walking nearly 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) over a five-month period. From this...