Jordan Thomas Mursinna: “Cracks in the Edifice: The Collapse of the Linnaean Order in England, 1803-1817”

Jordan Thomas Mursinna is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of History, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

Buttressed by the newly-formed Linnean Society of London and its dogmatic President, James Edward Smith, the Linnaean system was alive and well in England at the turn of the nineteenth century. By 1820, few reputable naturalists would profess allegiance to it as anything more than a pedagogical or practical tool. In the intervening years, members of the Society worked diligently to defend the Linnaean system from myriad threats, both foreign and local. These challenges, I argue, can be sorted into two basic types – conceptual attacks from increasingly-popular French theories, and empirical threats produced by a tide of novel specimens flowing from England’s expanding colonial networks. As new ways to properly divide and arrange nature gained prominent platforms, new forms strained existing categories – and the structure of the Linnaean system buckled under their collective weight.

This chapter considers the appeals of taxonomic reform in Late Georgian natural history and reconstructs the (often-cogent) arguments levied by Linnaeans in defense of their system. It then moves to recount the damage caused to English Linnaeanism by Smith’s engagement in a vitriolic and widely-publicized controversy with systematic reformist Richard Anthony Salisbury, before ultimately detailing the system’s gradual collapse in the 1810s. Throughout, I aim to demonstrate how theoretical reforms in Late Georgian systematics were routinely checked against an interconnected assemblage of political commitments, interpersonal relations, and the looming threat of a descent into taxonomic heterodoxy.