In 1795, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach came up with a new classification scheme. By the late 1700s, a number of thinkers were trying to improve on Linnaeus’s classification of humans. In his view, the four were more alike than different. He divided the human species into four varieties: European, American, Asiatic, and African. Linnaeus classified humankind as a species within the animal kingdom. Local varieties were merely instances in which one of the Lord’s created species had come to be adapted to its particular neighborhood. But in his system these varieties were not half as significant as true species. In Linnaeus’s vast botanical collections he did notice many examples of local plant varieties, variations on a theme. and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.” they represented the plan of God, who created the species in a single week, as described in the first pages of the Hebrew Bible: “And God created great whales. To him, and to other pious naturalists of his generation.
Every living thing is related, whether distantly or nearly, and every animal and plant shares the same ancestors at the root.īut that is not how Linnaeus himself saw his system.
We depict the order of life, in other words, as a family tree, a genealogy, in which the branches trace back to a common trunk. The trunk of the tree divides near its base to form kingdoms, and each great trunk divides again and again into ever-finer branches and twigs into species, subspecies, races, varieties, and, at last, like leaves on the twigs, individuals. Writer Jonathan Weiner notes that Linnaeus’s system is often drawn as a “tree of life.” In the 1730s, Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus devised a system that showed how living things are related to one another.