welcome everyone to this i think it's our fourth linen uh lens um event where um we take an object in our collection and we focus on it through uh both a powerpoint presentation but also through an external viewer that we have in work and today i'm absolutely delighted to welcome um dr mark spencer who is our um he's our honorary botany curator here at the linen society so he's in charge of both herbariums that we have he's an independent consultant but was formerly a senior botany curator at the natural history museum in charge of the historic collections british and irish herbarium for over a decade um and i'm going to say this mark is currently engaged in two historic botany research projects the first on the plants cultivated in fulham palace during the life of henry compton bishop of london and secondly the herbarium of reverend uh adam budal is that higher of course of course i should have known this um and today mark is going to talk to us about uh carlino's species plantarum so over to you mark thank you very much for that very generous introduction isabel i'm just going to share my screen and hopefully that is working for everybody um so oop would help if i put on the full screen naughty me we've got a couple of new bits of kit which i'm not used to using so hopefully i shall keep on control of everything so this talk today is going to be focusing upon one of hey the world's most important scientists uh our hero carlin hospital so naughty may put on the auto start on there but also upon one of his key and fundamentally important works species plantarum now this particular work is of key importance to us but us botanists because it is what we refer to as the starting point for modern botanical nomenclature and so it is key for us in terms of actually how we manage and organize understand the naming of nature in this particular case plants so species plant harem sits along system and nature as being fundamentally important works in the history of documenting the diversity of nature now it is fair to say that linnaeus did not spring out of the ether anew with all of these wonderful ideas he was a person who was working in a period of great scientific endeavor and exploration and he's part is in actually compiling and collating amongst other things so he himself sits upon the shoulders of many other people who were important and great in their own time for example the bauhan brothers who i'm going to mention momentarily because it is often said that linnaeus created the naming system that we use today um he's essentially it's fair to say the person who formalized and established the structures but many people before him including the bow hands were actually working on the challenge of how do we take this diver said diverse language that we used in science to create a naming system that was stable and useful and one of the things about names is that they're more than just a scientific affectation they're not a way of us just feeling that we can create something latinesque and pretty they are fundamentally important in terms of us being able to establish a connection through the natural world because it's by the process of giving a name that we can actually start to add information both within the library for example or within the context of our own personal understanding of the natural world connect that name with pieces of information about the natural world whether it be ecology biodiversity biochemistry etc etc or increasingly as we face the risks of our planet such things as extinction and environmental change so a name is so much more than just a label it is a hook upon which we can put much of the information about the natural world upon so the binomial system as it is now currently known um is a system which many of us are familiar with you know we ourselves are called homo sapiens and this binomial system that i say was formalized by vanessa in these two key works system nature and species plantarum they themselves were part of a much wider corpus of scientific works that linnaeus wrote throughout his life so they themselves are intimately connected with his other scientific literature but just to show you in itself one of the wonderful things about the binomial system itself is actually the simplicity and ease of access of that information so this delightful plant spurge laurel daphne l'oreola is a fairly common and reasonably widespread plant of ancient woodlands across southern england and various parts of western europe and is named daphne l'oreola and was given that name by linnaeus in 1753 in species planetarium now prior to linnaeus establishing this standardized naming system this particular plant came with a plethora of names depending upon the scientific tradition that you were following and they could be very diverse and very very different and here's a small snippet of the variations you could have for this one species so depending upon your academic discipline or your background and origins principally within europe you could be calling it daphne rasmus axillary bursts foliage lanciolartis labrus or daphne erasmus lateralibus folis lanciolatis integris or l'oreo the simpavirens flora viridi quizbardum l'oreola mass or just l'oreola now that in itself is clearly quite a daunting and complex presentation of information and therefore the creation of the binomial and the establishment of the binomial system helped ease the complexity and so in itself the binomial system is fundamentally important in actually gatewaying access to information now we are incredibly lucky within the linnaean society that we are the guardians of lynnea and much of linnaeus's personal collections and materials some of his collections were lost for various reasons historically but we have here in piccadilly in our vault in the basement some of the most important scientific works in the history of modern biological science so this image in front of you shows you uh the linnaean library so up here if i move my curse around these are his own personal copies of his publications and those of his students if you go further around the room there are also examples of his own personal library from other authors such as the bowhunge brothers beneath that and to the right there are the remnants of his insect and shell and fish collections but the bit that gets me personally deeply excited are these brown paper bundles with the linnaean plant specimens in and the linnaean herbarium this is was the modern representation of his personal collection was made through his life from about the 1730s 1720s 1730s to shortly before his death in the 1770s is the compilation of his exploration of the natural world and plants in particular each one of these bundles contains plant specimens such as these ones on top what is really really important about this presentation is that this collection is arranged pretty much with some changes made for various reasons and in the shortly after his death by his son and after it came to this country it is pretty much entirely as it was through this structure that he used in his life so this is an exceptionally important example of how a scientific connection has kept its physical integrity as a series of objects and that itself is very very important we often think in science of objects as being you know the thing that is important but i can assure you know as a museum curator we are also increasingly passionate about how the information is managed and organized so these specimens are arranged following linnaeus's sexual system as was referred to now the linnaean sexual system is actually in essence quite a simple system and what it required is for the observer to look at a flower and be able to count the male organs and the female organs and therefore if you had one male organ and one female organ it would be monoandria monogamia and therefore that provided you with the sequence by which you could put your specimens into it into your series so this system was very fundamentally important for the neos personally but it's also really important to recognize that actually he recognized its artificiality he says very importantly in one of his books philosophia botanica that this is essentially an information retrieval system and actually what is desirable is a way of classifying nature to reflect naturalness in some respects you can see that he's starting to grasp through some of the ideas around how diversity of life relates to each other and therefore ultimately even though the word is not in his mind potentially evolution it'll always be one of the great intangibles for us is that obviously we cannot risk putting thoughts and ideas into the minds of people who've gone before us but it's fair to say that lilius along with many other people at that time was grasping that relationship between an artificial system and actually reflecting the diversity of nature so this system is avowedly artificial but it is very useful and utilitarian so this next slide is to show you actually how linnaeus's collections are actually in many ways the forebears of a modern herbarium first of all it's pretty fair to say what is a herbarium a herbarium is essentially a dried collection of plants i often described it as being somewhat like a library it is a plant library describing the origins and diversity of plant life and in this particular case what we have here on the left is a modern herbarium specimen this is collected by myself in charles darwin's backyard down in downing kent about a decade or so ago and this exemplifies many of the differences but also the commonalities between collecting wild plants in the area of linnaeus and in the modern era so in both cases these plants are collected and they're dried as quickly as we possibly can without cooking them and they're mounted on paper and that is done in the case of linnaeus few things things like fish and animal glue we use various conservation grade glues to stick the plant to the sheets and in some institutions they little little paper straps so this is a dried specimen mounted on a piece of paper a modern collection will also have on top of that things like a capsule this this paper envelope here and that's where you can put things like seed fruits and other things that may become detached from the specimen there's a unique identifier because if you lose your specimen or you need some way of recording to it this helps you find it so the natural history museum where i used to work we had some 5 million or so plant specimens and therefore having a unique identifier to track where the object is is potentially very very valuable because it is incredibly easy to lose them down below we have the collection information this is the where it was collected when it was collected and by who as well as in some cases more detailed information about ecology these two other objects are on here are purely for imaging reasons they're put on as actually as part of the photographic process and to denote a bit of ownership now the linnaean specimen you can see here on the right hand side is very very different what you can see here is a plant specimen with none of the information that i've talked about or virtually none of the information that i talk about it and this causes many modern biologists or many observers to think that there is no information attached to that but that's because the information relating to this specimen is elsewhere so this number up here is not a linnaean cataloguing number this was put on in the 20th century as for into us to ensure that we could manage the collections down here is the linnaean cataloging system so here you have below the specimen you have the number one which i'll explain what this number means in a moment and also then is some specific epithet as we call it now or as linnaeus initially described it the norman trivialia because it was the trivial reduction of these long strings of polynomials these long scientific names so this is the non-trivialia and the species plantarum number which is very very important so the objects are fundamentally very different now i'm going to very quickly am i going to do it yet yes i'm going no i'm going to carry on just to carry on explaining a little bit more about the influence of linnaeus's sexual system this plate here was created by gale dionysius eret who was an early admirer of the nas in the 1730s and this was reprinted in general plantarum which was one of the precursor works for what ultimately became species plantarum now one thing to bear in mind about this is that the naming system you or rather the idea apologies of describing the idea that plants had sexuality was deeply controversial at the time and linnaeus had many many detractors at the time because this was considered to be quite an appalling idea and was referred to at one point by one of his peers as um awful harlotry it was such a disgraceful thing to be put in the idea that god's beautiful productions could have sex and sexuality now linnaeus's works were groundbreaking for many many reasons he was for example the first person in europe that we know of along with the head gardener to successfully flour and fruit a banana here we have a banana plant in front of this front is piece for his very very important work hortus clefortienus the reason this book is important is because it exemplifies a period in line as his life where he left sweden he traveled to the netherlands where he formed many long-standing personal and professional connections with dutch botanists and scientists and other people from around europe but he also encountered george clifford who entreated him and encouraged him to come and work for him in his own personal garden mark lost you for a moment can i say something can't hear you i think you've kicked out your nope can you hear me hear you yes i can hear you oh we can we can hear you now mark oh something i think you have a connect how where did you lose me out apologies ladies and gentlemen maybe go back uh back to there no okay just about apologies ladies and gentlemen so this particular volume is hortus cliffordianus and this work is very very important because it exemplifies the next steps in daenerys's life firstly um this was a period in his life when he left sweden and explored professional relationships with other scientists in the netherlands but he also developed his ideas and his system for creating a way of actually cataloging and describing nature so hortus clefortiens is very important and was created during his time working with george clifford and clifford asked him to create a catalogue of all of the plants growing in clifford's very very extensive private botanical garden so this particular work is in structure a precursor to species plantarum so at this point i'm momentarily going to stop sharing and come to the book itself so i just got to remember where to go to go to that and hopefully the visualizer is working can we all see that that's great thank you so here we have under the visualizer one of the most important books in the history of science this is linnaeus's personal copy of species plantarum the first edition 1753 and i can show you the very first time i held this my knees went to jelly because this is fundamentally important in terms of our relationship with the natural world because it helps develop the system of science that we use today for biology so this is his personal copy down in our from come taken up from our vault and if you turn over here we have the front title page which i'll go through in a little bit more tone as i say this was published in 1753 some 12 years after hortus clefortierness but it encapsulates and connects with many of the ideas that linnaeus decided he needed to do to create this naming system and method of retrieving information now what makes this copy unusual because there are other first editions of this work is that this is linnaeus personal working copy he had this copy and actually another one interleaved with blank sheets of paper and here you can see linnaeus is really quite challenging handwriting it's very small it's almost it's very flow flowing and i find it exceptionally difficult to read i know that um our head of collections isabel charmontiere is considerable considered a bit of an expert when it comes to his handwriting so this is the very first page now what i want you to look at is actually this element here at the front here this actually shows how the sexual system started to work so we have the first class which is monandria which means one male part then we have monogynya one female part and if you go through the sick class monandria there is monandria dignia trigonia etc etc so the very very first plant in the nasa's sexual classification system because it has one female and one male part is the plant which we still know by this name of kanna indian shot is another name for it so this is canna and if you look over on the other side you will see just here it says indica canna indica so this was the norman trivialia as linnaeus initially described it but it became later known as when we formalize the naming system as the specific epithet so canna the genus indica the species the specific epithet now i'm just going to turn over and because i'm going to show you in a slide because it's easier to show you inside what's going on with the content of this work because this work is not illustrated it is quite dense very information from rich text and this is another page i'm just going to show you again which has got further annotations now the reason for this annotation i'm going to just turn down the exposure of it i can see it seems glaring a bit is that he had these interleaved pages put on for later editions of the work so these little sections here are where he may have changed his mind about something or wish to introduce a new species so this work is without a doubt one of the most important scientific works of all time it is up there with the works of darwin and many others because without this and the other works of vinayas we would not have the means of keeping a grasp and understanding the diversity of the world's biodiversity as we know it today so i'm going to leave the screen momentarily i've got to remember to do something else i've got to share turn off the visualize i haven't title naughty mid wrong button go back to that go back to that and share again and if i've been successful that's all worked excellent brilliant i did it so just to show you in a little bit more detail what's going on with that very dense text here we have linnaeus's very first description of his first species in species plantarum tanner indica as we now know it so here we have the genus name and he also what he's doing here is not only writing a description what we call a protolog often of this species but he's also compiling all of the information from other scientists of the time and preceded him so in this particular case he's listed his preferred polynomial for this species so in 1753 linnaeus was essentially of the opinion the best name for this plant was cannafolisovartis your tranquility acumen artist navosis but he recognized to be quite handy to assist with this as his students to have the indica on the end i could just call it canarindica and it was this process of people actually going you know it's easier to say canna indica rather than this long polynomial that led ultimately to him formalizing this is the preferred way so that's his preferred name what he then does is he lists and cites other publications that he thinks are relevant to understanding this name for example hortus sarliensis which was another of his works and the work of adrian van royen for example he's also cited not surprisingly again another one of his works jortes clefortienus which i mentioned again but then he goes on to talk about other people such as the bauhan brothers and the bauhan's works this is bauhan's peanuts and cites their polynomials as well underneath that he then provides often a extremely short description of its habitat habitat intertropicals is fairly blunt and to the point and also where is known distribution was at this point aca africa and americana now um in this particular case we know that actually by this point this plant was actually not native into either africa asia it was an introduction from the americas so by 1753 this plant from the americas had become widely spread through the world and not surprising because it is still one of the most popular horticultural plants globally now coming back to the specimen over here so this is specimen number one from genus number one in the lynnean collection downstairs you'll see at the bottom in tiny writing it says indica at the bottom here and number one because that is the species plantarum number number one so from this information we know that this object is essentially linked to this description for this species kaner indica so this is what we refer to as original material for the name cana indica so we start to build up a picture of how actually a publication can relate to physical objects but the nasty sources for information were actually very very diverse so in this particular case this is another species which is from north america you can see this is the genus chiananthus which is related to ash trees and also to privet and olive it's a member of the olive family chinese virginica is one of north america's most beautiful smaller trees and shrubs again linnaeus goes through the very same process of putting his preferred name the nomin trivialia virginica and citing his literature sources but i just wanted to quickly just go through and show you actually how diverse these sources of information are because linnaeus was an extraordinarily brilliant compiler of information and this is one of the things that has made him very very useful to us if we're interested in the history of botany is that quite often pre-linear names are very very challenging to identify and his works can be very very useful in unpicking them because we can go through his publications and track back in time so not only are these works important for the modern world but they really do help us get a better understanding of enlightenment biological sciences as well so here are some of the sources for um his specimens and his ideas and here we have one of the most celebrated series of linnaean objects these these specimens are both from the natural history museum and just down the road here in central london this is from this particular one with this fabulous pod is actually from the clifford herbarium part of the collection that was made through the process of creating hortus clefortianus or some of them may have been from beforehand so this was collected in george clifford's garden in the 1730s or possibly shortly before and so this specimen is again original material because it is linked in hawk cliff two species plantarum then we have this incredibly bedraggled specimen which tells aries about sad tale this is from herb clayton but this is also actually of the natural history museum and clayton has a terrible history because he was one of the first people to create and document the floor of the north of north america unfortunately shortly after his manuscript was created his home burned down and his private collections including his own personal herbarium were destroyed and his manuscript and much of his wealth fortunately for science he'd been sending duplicate specimens to a gentleman called grenovius who was a friend and benefactor of linnaeus and linnaeus was able to observe these specimens to create his concept of chaonanthus virginicus but he also used artwork again from north america mark hatesby's incredibly important series of artworks and publications on the wildlife of north america exemplified by many of his important depictions of birds but in this particular case giananthus virginicus again which linnaeus cites in that description for this species and lastly his own personal specimen which he's got in the collection as well so linnaeus was pulling in a very very diverse source of sources of information to create his understanding of what things were now i'm not even sure how long i've been talking so i'm just going to have a momentary breather to talk about actually how this really relates to the modern world i've talked a little bit about the history in the past but these specimens are fundamentally important to our under understanding of the natural world but also to our well-being for various accidents of history and world society and frankly also to certain extent colonialism many of the linnaean specimens are key objects in the history of global trade and commodities so within the collections downstairs with the 14 south so thousand specimens of linnaeus that we look after we have what are now called the type specimens for many incredibly important plant species i've just picked up two this is the type specimen for rice and here we have the type specimen for tomato and we have hundreds of others down in downstairs so what is a type now a type is a is a way that is a system that's been created since the beginning of the 20th century in essence that helps us stabilize the idea of a scientific name such as a rise of satellite into a physical object and this is in the history of biological science it's a relatively recent innovation because linnaeus and his peers did not use the type concept he cited all of his sources publications such as kate space works or herbarium specimens that he'd seen he did not choose an individual object and say that is the one that most exemplifies or represents what i think about this idea because these are ideas so the development of the type specimen idea gets around some naughty problems because increasingly in the latter part of the 19th and 20th century we started to realize that many earlier scientific names had when we looked at the objects and the information multiple different types of organism embedded within them so we needed to be able to choose an object that tied in our understanding with the original use of the name so the type the lect type the physical representation of this name has a very valuable way of stabilizing that understanding so these type specimens help us understand what organisms are they have value and relevance for things like international trade because you know organisms the identity are disputed it may well come down and i'm actually working on a trade dispute at the moment it may well come down to looking at museum specimens to validate and inform what's going on so type specimens are incredibly important objects not only for biodiversity but also medicine commerce agriculture et cetera et cetera et cetera virtually any endeavor of humanity that involves the natural world now i'm just going to momentarily flip again if i can remember how to do that stop share i'm going to go back to the visualizer to show you two specimens that i brought up to talk about this idea a little bit further so now one thing's about many linnaean specimens is you have to bear in mind that they are rather old and they're rather brown and they're not very green very often occasionally they do but this particular specimen it may not look much in many respects i'm just going to check focusing and focus that but this actually is oh is the sound ah sounds gone again i just got a note saying no you're working good i think you are i think some people have trouble with the sound for some reason but they're coming through okay i just saw a note flag up saying sound so this particular specimen is something i'm looking at at the moment because we've just received an inquiry about this plant this is liparia graminifolia and it comes from south africa from the cape region one of the world's most diverse places for wild plants now sadly liparia graminifolia is now believed to be extinct and not even extinct in the wild there's no known cultivated living specimens of this plant anywhere in the world and it has been extinct for many many decades i'm just following up on an inquiry because part of my role as honorary curator is to help scientists look at the specimens understand their history and facilitate scientific access to these materials in this particular case i'm following up on an inquiry about whether this plant may have viable seed here so this is the flower spike at the moment which i had a quick look at under the microscope and it is all bloom there's no seed there but down here at the bottom i've had a quick look a few minutes ago and there are some capsules there that may with further inquiry and examination may have seed we don't know as yet whether that will be viable or not so it could well be that maybe in a few years you might hear some wonderful news that this object has helped revive an extinct species the chances are frankly remote because this has been in a cupboard for a very very long time and the next one i want to show you neither of these specimens are particularly glamorous but they are important as are all the name specimens frankly but this one i like very much is because these two plants here are again type material for a very very important plant of european origin which is now found globally this is fat hen kenopodium album now fat hen is interesting because it's also what's referred to as a crop wild relative this plant is related to canoa the very very important crop of south american origin so this plant is a crop wild relative now crop wild relatives are important because these wild relatives of important plants may well have genes and genetic identity and characteristics and traits that could be very useful for us in a changing world such as resistance to drought resistance to extra soil salinity because both drought and salinity are very very important negative impacts which are going to increase and affect global agriculture so in this particular case again i've just been helping some researchers from america because kinapodium album belongs to a complicated group of plants and they need to re-examine the original plant material to check the identity of it to show that we're all on the right page and we're talking about the right organisms because some kinapodiums are invasive and some are crop wild relatives so in this particular case i've harvested some of the seed which you can see lying loose these are incredibly delicate you have to be very careful these are the seeds these have been sent in a very small packet to america so that the researchers can study them with microscope to help identify what's going on with this particular specimen so our historic collections are more than just history they are part of worldwide active science and really really not only part of our cultural heritage and scientific heritage in the heritage of this country but of the world these are objects of international importance and we are incredibly proud to be the owners of them but we're also incredibly grateful to the genius that is carl linnaeus and his wonderful collection and his extraordinary book species planned harum thank you very much thank you very much mark um great that was amazing thank you i i'm glad you managed to come in i'm sorry for everyone who has had some problem with the sound which seems to be from the eventbrite uh link rather than our zoom link so um okay so we've got a few questions sorry my future's playing up uh we've got a few questions in the in in the questions um q a box um the first one is are there any references to plant diseases of fungal pathogens in his collection so uh linnaeus is fair to say was clearly most fabulous when it came to doing plants um the understanding of the fungal world was challenging at this point and relatively limited partly because identifying fungi certainly requires quite high power microscopy etc etc and on top of that uh fungi do not tend to lend themselves to being squashed flat on herbarium sheets um so linnaeus did publish scientific names of fungi most of them essentially are not used today for various technical reasons um and they're actually subsumed by a different starting point as we refer to which i always forget the date of so most linnae and fungal names are now a bit of history but we do have fungi from his collections in the linnan society collections they're relatively small number um but some of those have been useful for doing current research so we do have fungi some of which are plant pathogens others are just fungal organisms we also do have um quite an extensive collection of zyconized fungi and the linnaean lichen names are the basis of many modern like names so the linnaean lichen collections which i also they form part of this series are of significance and importance but the the true fungal so to speak which rather naughty way of describing it has received less academic work but we do have some um another there's a few questions um has there been any thought to dna barcoding any each specimen in the collection i'd love it i've it's been my fantasy league thing for around 20 years um that it would be wonderful to get a funding project off the ground to get all of the lynnae and actually frankly also the smith herbarium which is the other collection get more dna barcoded a just for that kind of scientific curiosity but it could be potentially incredibly powerful for sorting out some continuing ambiguities with scientific names because my role of the lennaian society sits on the back of the greats my former boss charlie jarvis and preceding him many other people but particularly willie stern who did a huge amount of work to increase that and spencer savage poor old spencer savage naughty me forgetting spencer savage did a huge amount of work to help us understand the history of linnaeus's collections getting the dna bit done would be wonderful one of the things that often surprises um botanical visitors to the collection is they would just imagine that we've identified all of linnaeus's specimens that's not the case we have many specimens in the linnaean collection which are in debt indetermined and identified and therefore on top of that we have the legacy of the linnaeum world which erupts out into the smith herbarium so in the spithfarium we have many specimens from the nasa's son linnaeus phillies who sadly didn't last many years after his father's death but lynnaeus's philosophy's collections are incredibly important in their own right because many of them originate from banks and solanders work with captain cook on the voyage on the endeavor so there are many many gaps to be filled both in terms of the identities and the dna of these organisms and there's lots and lots of lovely messages in the chat actually um you have very very nice feedback um but i don't have time to go through all that there's another question um i know mark will not be able to give us uh specific details but i wondered if you could tell us the type of things that come up as part of a trade dispute yeah so um on occasion for example i've had a few of these so people i suspect some people might know my other kind of work i do as a botanist is i'm a forensics investigator where again naming organisms is fundamentally important forensics would fall apart without taxonomy all the kind of forensics i do so um one of the things that can happen for example is that a commodity can be contaminated with other material and the dispute may focus on where the contaminant came from and what its identity is so i could for example get sent contaminants for identification um or there's sometimes questions around people purposefully or accidentally mistrading materials and again this is where you know the science of taxonomy and the use of nomenclature comes into play because you need to be able to stride in and save the day by helping and picking people's understanding of scientific names oh isabella oh you're back i've gone on mute because i was coughing uh what about the idea of pangenomics trying to capture the whole variability of a species does that imply type specimens may lose part of their importance uh no but one of the things i didn't touch on because obviously it was an incredibly fast rampage through this is that the type specimen is not necessarily the best exemplar or the most diversely representative of that idea that scientific name so yes you could do pangenomics and get a very wide understanding of the genetic diversity of a population or series of populations and therefore ergo a species or series of species we still need that physical object to tie it to the name and the way often you need to think about human human diversity you know if for example um an alien came down from space and found us for the very first time and they wanted to they decided to use the linnaean system you know they might choose to bosch bash me on the head put me in a pickling jar and take me off in their spaceship i don't necessarily have all of the characteristics of humanity but i'm a representative of human traits so that's what type specimen does it doesn't cover the whole diversity it is representative of it is the type specimen for homo sapiens i think he was have been considered to be the time specimen now i did briefly look that up but then the pdf wouldn't open for some reason it was very annoying there is a pdf on there talking about the nurse's bones and his type status i think he was proposed to be tight freshman by william stone i think i think i might yeah i might be old and someone else says i'd be interested to see the list of his species and hosts i'm not quite sure i understand that question say species-wise and then presumably is that following from the fungal no it's on its own yeah probably sorry say that again padma didn't hear that i think it's about pathogens okay yeah i think it is yes i mean so the best place to get information about the nay and names in a book form is just reaching across apologies is back to front this is the work of my predecessor and marvelous former boss charlie jarvis order out of chaos because this details all of the lynnae and plant names and fungi and algae for that matter um there is also online there is the project that was run around this which is called the linnaean plant name typification project is fair to say that the compiling and getting your head around scientific names is still an ongoing process we're still going from the period of you know paper publications and literature to an online resource so there are several very very valuable international resources for information on linnae and other early names plant name typification project website but also a thing called tropicos from basin from missouri botanic garden or queues plants of the world just to name a couple of them it's quite a large and complicated topic as you can imagine and there's another two questions um greetings from beijing china thanks very much for such a great talk um i would be interested to know if the practice of nomenclature in species plantarum is really consistent with linnaeus's statement in philosophia botanica or critical botanica it seems to me that the latter two books make some overly restrictive requirements ah now there's some very considered and probably thoughtful questions i'm not sure i'm capable of answering to be honest um i haven't actually read philosophy botanica for years so i think yeah it's fair to say that you know the book book i think date wise they were published quite early on in his career as well they're quite tight constructions and yes they probably do have a certain degree of prescriptiveness about them um [Music] i don't know whether anybody's ever really done a full critique analysis about the relationship between the collections and those works it i think it would be a complex and very very interesting thing to do i don't know how easily it would be to be funded for example in this country but the other thing you have to bear in mind is that the linnaean collections are whilst they're largely intact they did suffer as very significant damage and so we know that after his death um this collection was put in the garden shed in hammerbee for a while where it suffered damage and his son uh when he was able to get access to it actually threw away quite large quantities of material that was severely damaged so some of the intellectual structure that the nest may have had has probably been lost um it's also fair to say that the subsidiary materials around that such as the collections that absolutely was working on and other sets of material have gone through quite major change you know the important linnean collections of the natural history museum as well so it might be a bit of a stab in the dark to see how well you could actually look at the relationship between those publications and and the herbariums but it's a fascinating collection and uh really nice to hear from somebody from beijing i was just going to say momentarily hello again and um i fell in love with your nan a few years ago so yes i'd love to we've got we've got quite an international audience actually mark there's people from taiwan new zealand us canada italy spain it's really lovely brilliant there's one question left um and the the person uh apologizes uh about the question because i have no deep knowledge in botanical and taxonomical study but i don't think you should apologize because that's what so cool and so um he asks because of the advance of taxonomic system how conservative the species scientific names that described bilinears compared with the current species scientific names not that's not a naive or simple question at all in fact again that's got a lot of layers of complexity in it one thing you have to bear in mind is that nomenclature the act the process or the technique of naming an organism is not quite the same as the taxonomy which is you know the philosophical processes the intellectual processes and the information synthesis process that creates an understanding of what natural diversity is you know is it a species or not which in itself is an interesting complex question so one of the things fair to say is you know if you take that complex idea and strip it down a lot of linnaeus's generic and species concepts have stood the test of time both in terms of their utility on a day-to-day basis for communicating what organisms are the fact that you know his scientific name fuchsia is now just a garden plant named fuchsia fuchsia says an enormous amount about that utility so his taxonomic concepts in many ways have stood the test of time and on quite a few occasions they've resurfaced 200 or so years later when afterwards people go oh no lynette's got it wrong and then the dna comes along and they go actually he got it right so one of the things about the dna revolution is that it has helped clarify and expand upon that core knowledge and way of looking at the world that people like linnaeus and his peers because again a bit like darwin or we tend to think of both darwin and linnaeus as being unitary kind of people who just function in their own special sphere and yes they were extraordinary people but they were part of a really really diverse community of scientists working on these understandings so yeah um his the sexual system went but he kind of guessed that would anyway he states that was you know that was probably desirable but the binomial is here to stay um actually two more questions have come in sorry hello from the philippines land of gay or camel yay this is kind of a random question uh but do you have any techniques in mind upon how to easily understand the whole taxonomic system the the person is struggling to study biology my gosh i think the most important thing and i think you know it's just a thing about actually about how we relate to the natural world is don't rush in spend time observing i think one of the greatest um contributions of linnaeus um in many ways was his observational skills you don't actually necessarily need to put a name or a descriptor or a rationale on something initially the act of observing very slowly and very carefully is so fundamentally important you know one of the things i always try and get beginners to do and i'm guessing you're not a beginner but for people even experienced people as human beings we're terrible at looking things quickly and thinking we've not understood getting at times turned hand lens and looking at a plant and really getting to grips with its personality looking at how the flowers structured how the leaves are structured where the hairs are that helps you understand the organism and through that process you then start to build the connections but you know the natural world is very complex and very large and it takes patience that's lovely thank you mark and the last question is are there any great children's books on the life of carlinaeus i don't my daughter's name is linnea after the swedish flower so i've got one for you thank you isabelle yes i think that there is something isn't there yeah it's called carol get out of the garden and there might be some others around but that's the one that's come to me um i can't think of anything else uh and i think that's it actually and so i'm gonna end this with a uh as a someone who said mark's enthusiasm is contagious and i agree so thank you so much mark this has been really really uh fantastic talk thank you for joining us direct from the linear society in piccadilly and thank you everyone for joining us just very apologies can i say something really quickly so i suspect this is a very diverse community of scientists and non-scientists but we are a very friendly and open organization if you have an interest in our history our collections our specimens or our artwork contact us and for scientists in particular please have a look at our pages and if you recognize anything and you can give us names or would like to do dna research on us let us know on us i mean our specimen is not dna research or nurse apologies no that's a good point and i'm putting in right there the uh the link to our online collections where all the specimens manuscripts books have been digitized and can be browsed freely uh online and thank you thank you again mark our next linear lens will be on a book of uh painting of birds on micah from india by henry nolte and this will be i think it's the 14th of december and that's it goodbye everyone thank you for joining