Travel and Presentation

On 12 May 1732, Linnaeus – then a 25-year-old student of medicine – left Uppsala for a natural history research journey to Lapland.³

He had successfully applied for institutional and financial support from the Kunglig Vetenskaps Societet Uppsala, justifying the specific need for a research trip to Lapland by maintaining that this “province – so remarkably different in every respect from all other provinces – still lies involved in the most gruesome barbarity” (Linnaeus 1879, 77–78; on the political and economic background of Linnaeus' Lapland travel, see Sörlin 1994 and Koerner 1999, ch. 3). Due to this orientation, Linnaeus' travel diary – compiled from daily notes taken while traveling (Fries 1971) – follows the plot of a “trip into the heart of darkness” culminating in the swamps of Lyckelse-Lappmark through which Linnaeus and two unnamed persons accompanying him, one of them a Sámi interpreter, “had to walk with the greatest effort.” “I had enough of the trip now,” the diary goes on, “we went into the wilderness, not knowing, where the next neighbour was” (Linnaeus 1913, 58–59). The journey had reached a region completely outside the infrastructure Linnaeus was accustomed to, and thus, in contrast to a normal trip, its final destination. In this situation Linnaeus portrays himself as losing the faculty to relate even the most fundamental concepts to his surroundings: When the Sámi interpreter who had been sent out for assistance returned with the “next neighbour,” Linnaeus described her as the terrifying incarnation of a “furia,” not being able to decide whether she “was a man or a woman” (ibid.).⁴

Despite the reputed confusion, the report continues with an interview Linnaeus had with the “furia” which is framed by a description of her habitus, complexion, and garment. Within this description the following revealing portrayal of the “furia's” gender is given: “Over her breast, which looked like a frog's skin, dangled long, brown tits, covered by brass loops.” This portrayal, applying criteria Linnaeus would use later in his career to define mammals in general (Schiebinger 1993), is “zoological” to the brink of obscenity, depriving the woman encountered of her terrifying and, as it were, “Laplandic” individuality. And indeed, in the interview she appears as a quite communicative and helpful person, patiently answering Linnaeus' questions about direction and food. Linnaeus, on his part, had something to give in return: he carefully noted down her complaints about being compelled by law to visit church each Sunday. This text, by its intricate involution of picturesque anecdote and technical description, demonstrates that Linnaeus – notwithstanding his alleged isolation – was quite able to build up and maintain a network of local informants, assistants, and trade partners to pursue his journey's goals: translating Lapland, its inhabitants, and its natural and cultural products into representations he could bring home.⁵

In one instance the travel diary makes such translation work explicit: Supplemented by an illustration (fig. 1), Linnaeus describes a plant encountered in the Laplandic swamps:

As has been pointed out by Gunnar Eriksson, this description associates an element of Laplandic nature with classical mythology in a way reminiscent of what has been termed “the emblematic world view” that characterizes pre-classical natural history (Eriksson 1994, 168–177; cf. Bredekamp 1992, 82–83; Ashworth 1990). It thus documents, it seems, an anachronistic extension of this worldview into the otherwise strictly “classical” work of Linnaeus. But what Eriksson's characterization misses is the fact that both the text and the accompanying picture conjoin the two seemingly exclusive ways of representing nature – “emblematically” and “taxonomically.” On one side, the “fictional, mystical, figurative” way, as Linnaeus designates it in the drawing, where both text and drawing describe the plant in terms of a mythological life history. The plant is thus represented as a concrete, living individual interacting with its particular environment (even Linnaeus' own situation can be seen to be projected into it). On the other side, the “true, genuine, depicted” way, where both text and drawing render a taxonomic representation of “Andromeda,” textually by using descriptive terms from botanical terminology (thus the use of Latin expressions), pictorially by exhibiting the plant in a rather stiff, upright position, which allows recording its characteristic morphologic features (on the taxonomic contents of eighteenth-century botanical drawings, see Nickelsen 2002). Thus by identifying certain of its parts and their individual form, Linnaeus analytically refers Andromeda to plant forms already determined within extant botanical knowledge.⁶

However, as much as analytic description and depiction had the power to render accounts of Laplandic plants in terms of extant, botanical knowledge, they did so (qua analysis) by upsetting the coherence of their individual Laplandic situation. While the “true” drawing, e.g., just shows another plant that happens to possess “pointed leaves,” “Andromeda's” raised hands form an essential part in the “fictional” drawing as they express her situation. To count as “true” representations of Laplandic situations, therefore, analytic descriptions had to be exactly correlated with descriptions of these situations using other means of expression, in this case metaphor, to capture their coherence – and it is this strategy of translation as a way of multiplying representations to capture as many aspects of an object as possible, that the passage about Andromeda makes explicit.

The correlation of analytic and metaphoric description, which prepared the ground for their mutual translation, depended, however, on the presence of the object that was thus represented in a twofold way. How could that presence be secured? Another passage from the travel diary and a parallel one from a report Linnaeus sent back to the academy in Uppsala during the trip answers this question. In order to finally reach truly exotic plants, Linnaeus undertook a vertical shortcut to regions that had never been previously researched. Starting from a settlement connected to a mine, he climbed up a high mountain, Mount Vallivare. From its top he reports the following:

Again, as in Lyckelse-Lappmark, Linnaeus describes himself as conceptually disorientated: the plants themselves, the soil they grow in, and ultimately their whole “situation” are unknown to him. And again, the first effect of this environment is awe-inducing, but mastered in a different way from that in Lyckelse-Lappmark: Linnaeus settles down at a spot giving him some kind of overview, and starts to “describe” and “collect.”

The results of the first activity – “describing” – are documented by the notes that follow immediately on the passage just quoted (fig. 2): Linnaeus pinned down the exotic plant kinds in a numbered list of “names,” i.e., of short phrases beginning with the name of an already known plant genus and followed by a few, descriptive adjectives. Two entries in this list, for two further, “new” species of Andromeda, may illustrate such “names”:

• 18. Andromeda foliis Empetri, flore ceoruleo.
• 19. Andromeda foliis Lycopodii, flore albo, semiovato, semi-5fido. (ibid, 109)

For economic reasons obvious for fieldwork, such “names” reduce description to the utmost extreme in two ways. First, by subsuming the “new” plant kind under a known plant genus, and second, by specifying it as a “new” plant species by stating features that presumably distinguish it from its known congeners, these features either formulated in technical terms (thus the strange expression “semi-5fido”), or in comparative terms by referring to features of other known plant kinds (foliis Empetri- vs foliis Lycopodii). As economic as this way of appropriating “new” plant forms may seem, it is equally obvious how tentative and problematic it is: On the one hand, the descriptive “names” imply identifications and differentiations reaching far beyond the material actually at hand (the list in the diary neither contains an entry for Empetrum or Lycopodium, nor for other Andromeda-species). On the other hand, no further information on the plants is provided than that implied by the “names.” Implicitly the list says too much and explicitly too little. And the rough sketches added were certainly not enough to overcome these limitations.

The second activity of appropriation – “collecting” – could effectively transcend the limitations of field description. In his travel equipment, Linnaeus carried “a bunch of sheeted paper, to lay plants in” (Linnaeus 1913, 11). Collecting essentially consisted of preparing plants for a herbarium, i.e. transferring dried plant individuals on sheets of paper. This enabled Linnaeus to align his list with stabilized specimens – “immutable mobiles” that were unchanged, or hardly changed, by transport – of the species referred to in the list (on this practice, see te Heesen 2000). These specimens could be used again and again as referents for renewed attempts at representation, either on the journey while collecting information on their medicinal uses, or after the journey in refined and extended attempts at their representation. In this series of re-representations a multitude of views or aspects of the specimens would be created that would always retain a common relation to the specimens thus represented, and thus to the species represented metonymically by the specimens. As a matter of fact, without such specimens, the list of “names” produced on Mount Vallivare would have hardly made any sense later. Essentially it was a provisional list of specimens collected for further scrutiny at a later date: some of the names on the list were changed by Linnaeus' hand, and to other names, questions were added, such as “maybe another genus? (an aliud genus?).”

Thus, Linnaeus' Laplandic experiences were translated twofold, as a series of inscriptions in his diary and also as stabilized specimens that those inscriptions referred to. However, he did not find an opportunity to present his findings to a wider public until he went to Holland early in 1735 to get his degree as a doctor of medicine.⁷

On his way there he stopped over in Hamburg and was met with intense curiosity about his Lapland travel. Linnaeus responded in a spectacular way by performing as a shaman in the Sámi garment he had brought with him from Lapland. He thus took on the habit of an indigenous Laplander who was endowed with special, authoritative knowledge, which “consisted in some kind of natural magic” according to Linnaeus. Having depended on translators in Lapland, Linnaeus himself now became a translator of Laplandic matters for Central European audiences. But his authority did not depend only on his enactment of someone who was familiar with the secrets of Lapland; it also depended on the specimens of natural objects and artifacts he carried with him from Lapland in which he could instantiate by immediate reference his knowledge about this remote region's nature and culture.⁸

In both contexts now – performance and presentation – the objects of curiosity were isolated from their original settings. The person in the Laplandic garment was not a Sámi shaman using his garment in a certain coherent way to achieve a certain outcome, but someone acting as if he did so. Similarily, the specimens in his collection were not part of their natural environment, but were presented as dead objects glued onto sheets of paper. Thus stabilized and isolated from their original context, they acquired an abstract individuality in terms of mutual independence and indifference: In an oil portrait of Linnaeus posing in his Laplandic costume (fig. 3), he wears a “curious hat” which his diary describes (in the passage about the encounter with the “furia”) as a headwear exclusively worn by “lap-women” (Linnaeus 1913, 60; for a corresponding description and sketch of the hat worn by men, see ibid., 55). Rather than actually personifying a Sámi shaman, Linnaeus quite consciously acted as a stage for the simultaneous and recombinant presentation of diverse specimens of Laplandic culture and nature.⁹

Now, such recombinant presentation was not only possible for the collection of Laplandic objects brought along by Linnaeus, but equally for that collection and collections provided from older sources. The frontispiece to the Flora Lapponica (1737), Linnaeus' final, comprehensive publication on Laplandic matters, features a Laplandic landscape with the midnight sun at its lowest point in mid-summer and various Sámi engaged in their peculiar, reindeer-dependent economy (fig. 4; for a discussion of this frontispiece, see Broberg 1980). In the center resides a figure in a Sámi garment with a magical drum in its lap. The figure has Linnaeus' features, but he is not pictured as a traveler but as someone contemplating objects spread around him. On a closer look, indeed, the assemblage of these objects turns out to be of a completely heterochronic and heterotopic composition, some drawn from Linnaeus' travel diary, some from other sources. Thus the figure carrying a boat in the center of the frontispiece is copied from a sketch in Linnaeus' diary – but according to the accompanying diary text it does not represent a Sámi, but a Swedish peasant (Linnaeus 1913, 41). And the reindeer-sled below is copied from a woodcut in Schefferus' Lapponia (Scheffer [1673] 1674, 106), though it does not fit at all into the mid-summer landscape. The frontispiece presents a landscape-like picture of Lapland as a whole, composed out of reshuffled, heterogenous bits and pieces of information on that exotic region to create a “virtual” landscape exposing a combination of typically “Laplandic” elements. This becomes especially conspicuous in the appearance of a small, flowering plant in the frontispiece's lower right hand corner, named Linnaea in the Flora lapponica in honor of its discoverer (see the respective dedication on plate XII in Linnaeus 1737b): It seems to be “pasted” on the picture, its naturally creeping stalks upright and the root laid bare. And, in fact, it was simply copied from a wood-cut accompanying Rudbeck's Index of Laplandic plants, published in 1724 (cf. fig. 6b), and it would reappear on almost all portraits of Linnaeus (cf. fig. 4). Linnaea has become a timeless and placeless emblem on the frontispiece, signifying the flora of Lapland, and, as it were, its compiler.

The heterochronic and heterotopic order created by re-producing and reshuffling extant pieces of information about Lapland and concurrent shifts in meaning also appear in the main text of the Flora lapponica (cf. Foucault [1967] 1986; Ophir and Shapin 1991 on “heterotopias”). It contains a lot of the information Linnaeus gathered during his travels, together with references to older literal and pictorial sources, in each case tied to an entry for a particular plant species. Thus, both the “mythological” account of the life history of Andromeda as well as the trip to Mount Vallevare are integrated into the description of the respective Andromeda-species, together with a collection of references to older literature on these species (Linnaeus 1737b, 129–130); in the description of the common birch, Linnaeus assembles what he had been able to find out about Sámi medicine and that of the dwarf birch is used to report on their housing (ibid., 261–270), etc. These connections between plant species and bits and pieces from the travel report were at times highly artificial, but they allowed Linnaeus to publish a considerable amount of his findings on Lapland. In clear-cut difference from the travel report, however, the Flora lapponica distributes the information contained in the travel diary in the tabular order of a taxonomic system. It does not follow the linear day-to-day and mile-after-mile order of the travel diary, nor does it try to treat the plants in the order of their natural habitats (though this order is analyzed in the introduction to the Flora lapponica). Accordingly, one does not have to read the Flora lapponica in a linear fashion as would be the case with a travel narrative. Instead, one may read it jumping at random from one species entry to the other. What was accessible only in a serial fashion in the context of travel was now simultaneously and universally accessible through a taxonomic system.¹⁰

Corresponding to this change in context, one can note a considerable change in the kind of information provided by the Flora lapponica in comparison with the travel diary: The morphology of each of the “new” plant species discovered in Lapland is described in extensive detail under the separate heading “descriptio,” strictly following a certain standard pattern and rigidly excluding any other information but morphological. Thus, e.g., we saw that Linnaeus' travel diary may describe a plant's leaves as being like those of another plant; such references are systematically lacking in the descriptiones contained in the Flora lapponica.¹¹

In the case of plants not yet described or rare plants, descriptions may be accompanied by a copper plate produced from dried specimens supplied by Linnaeus.¹² The contours of Laplandic plants become sharper, so to speak, as the distance between specimens and their original settings has increased, a distance not so much determined geographically, but rather by a series of translations involving the repeated rearrangement and representation of the specimens in varying contexts and media. The “distant viewpoint” of the Linnaean “natural system” begins to articulate itself in the Flora lapponica.

Collation and Catalog

The Flora lapponica was published during a most productive period of Linnaeus' life, August 1736 to October 1737. Among various other books, to which we will have to return, Linnaeus published a seminal plant taxonomic work in January 1737: the Genera plantarum. Compared to the Flora lapponica, its content appears extremely unintuitive, abstract, and formal: It consists solely of definitions of plant genera, each headed by a serial number, the generic name (only one in each case), and references to previous authors who attempted a definition, each determining a certain set of morphologic variables in a highly technical terminology (fig. 5). All other information, e.g., habitus, life-history, physiology, ecology, cultural significance, or geographic distribution – information in which the Flora lapponica so luxuriantly abounds – is systematically lacking. Linnaeus called a definition of this kind “natural character (character naturalis)” to distinguish it from the “artificial character (character factitius)” on the one hand, which adduces only a few, diagnostic features in a dichotomous fashion to distinguish a genus from a particular set of other genera, and from the “essential character (character essentialis)” on the other hand, which adduces a “singular” feature to distinguish a genus from all other genera at once, but which can only be established after all genera have been detected (Linnaeus 1737c, Ratio operis §§ 15–17 [unpag.]). In contrast to the latter two kinds of “characters,” the “natural” one distinguishes a genus from all other genera at once (as it combines a whole group of features independently from their diagnostic virtue in respect to certain other genera) and does so even under the condition of a successively growing body of botanical knowledge, and not only after that growth has been completed (ibid §18; cf. Linnaeus 1737a, Lectori [unpag.]). In short: Linnaeus claimed that his natural characters embody a universal taxonomy of plant forms.

At first glance, the relation of the Genera plantarum to the Flora lapponica appears clear-cut: As the latter assembles its species entries under headings that state a generic name and the serial number under which the corresponding generic definition can be found in the Genera plantarum, it seems that the Genera plantarum just elucidates the taxonomic criteria according to which Linnaeus grouped his Laplandic material in order to get a grip on its diversity (Linnaeus 1737b, Lectori [unpag.]). The definitions in the Genera plantarum function as “higher-order inscriptions” which “make the many act as one” (Latour 1987, 234–237). While this is certainly true, it does not, however, provide an answer to an interesting question: The definitions in the Genera plantrarum are restricted to a very specific set of features – “number, figure, position, and proportion of all the parts of the fructification [i.e. flower and fruit only]” as Linnaeus has it (1737c, Ratio operis § 19 [unpag.]). Why just these variables, and not others, e.g. features pertaining to the vegetative parts (leaves, root a. s. o.) or the overall “habitus” as in the age old distinction of herbs and trees? Why call these and others like “taste, smell, color, magnitude” “vague and slippery,” while the selected variables are proclaimed as “certain and real,” “certain and firm mechanical principles”? As Linnaeus himself states, there are no arguments, neither a priori nor a posteriori (in the sense of merely empirical), to justify this selection (ibid. § 11). Must the imposition of generic definitions on the diversity of Laplandic plants be seen as a one-sided, usurpatory, and ultimately arbitrary act to force material into some kind of manageable order?

To answer these questions, one has to take a look at another publication of 1737, which the introduction of the Genera plantarum mentions alongside the Flora lapponica, as presenting the species forming the scope of its generic definitions: the Hortus cliffortianus, a catalog of plants contained in the large, private botanical collection of George Clifford, a merchant banker and for some time director of the Dutch East India Company. On recommendation by two of Holland's leading botanists, Hermann Boerhaave at Leyden and Johan Burmann at Amsterdam, Linnaeus had been assigned by Clifford, for free lodging and a generous salary, to compile this catalog of his collection, which encompassed a garden on his estate at Hartekamp near Harlem, a herbarium, and a rich botanical library (Wijnands and Heniger 1991, 130–133). The time spent on this task is explicitly referred to in the Genera plantarum as a precondition to their completion.

In the Hortus cliffortianus one finds frequent references to the “collation (collatio)” of plant material to decide upon taxonomic questions. Thus Linnaeus refers to “the collation with a specimen [received] from Sherard” as proof that a species of Saxifraga, which he had collected in Lapland, was really a distinct, new species of Saxifraga (Linnaeus 1737d, 167; this had remained undecided in Linnaeus 1737b, 172). Similar remarks are found in the Flora lapponica: After expressing doubts that the genus Andromeda is really distinct from the genus Erica, Linnaeus adds, that “this will be taught by collated flowers of more species from both genera” (Linnaeus 1737b, 126). “Collation,” it seems, simply refers to a comparison of two or more specimens. Now, in the preface to the Genera plantarum Linnaeus described his procedure for establishing “natural characters” in terms reminiscent of such comparisons:

Taken at face value, this procedure would amount to the following: Considering species representations – living exemplars, herbarium specimens, pictorial representations and/or written descriptions – locally available in a given collection, certain sets of them are combined to represent one and only one genus. Morphological variables will then be recorded for these sets, those exhibiting differences within the set being systematically discarded, those identical throughout the set being systematically retained to enter the genus definition (for a more detailed analysis, see Svensson 1945; Müller-Wille 2001b). In principle, enough material for such a procedure was at hand in Clifford's collection (the Hortus cliffortianus lists about 2500 species!). But to see more closely how it determined the taxonomy presented in the Genera plantarum it is necessary to take a look at 1) how that collection was organized, 2) how it had been assembled, and 3) how the catalog compiled by Linnaeus related to that collection.

To answer the first question one can take a look at the way Linnaeus described the collection in the dedication to Clifford introducing the Hortus cliffortianus:

There is a surprising resemblance with the account from Mount Vallivare: Again a situation of geographic disorientation and of social isolation is stated. This is surprising because the context differs so widely: Clifford's garden is not situated at the border of the known world, but – as stated right from the start – in one of its commercial centers. Accordingly it is not a lack of knowledge that is responsible for the alleged disorientation. Quite the opposite is true: The disorienting impression is said to result from the fact that certain plants known to come from widely different regions of the world are nevertheless growing at a single spot. The exoticness of Clifford's garden is not emphasized in terms of an untouched and never before experienced wilderness, but in terms of an artfully contrived collection of plants in order to demonstrate Clifford's economic and political power in drawing together spectacular and precious plant specimens from all over the world, his power in creating, so to speak, his own “new” world in the old. With this, Clifford's plant collection clearly was an exemplar of the kind of collections typical for seventeenth-century court and urban patrician culture (see Olmi 1993; Findlen 1994, pt iii; Findlen 1996; Cunningham 1996, 41–47; Whitaker 1996; Drayton 2000, 26–49; Spary 2000, 22–25).

To see how Clifford had been able to assemble such a collection – he was, after all, no professional botanist as Boerhaave or Burman – one may take up a clue contained in the passage quoted above: One of the four exotic plants mentioned in that quote is called Hernandia, a designation introduced for the plant in question by Charles Plumier in 1703 to honor Francisco Hernandez, the first trained botanist to explore the flora of South America in the late sixteenth century (Linnaeus 1737d, 485; on Hernandez, see López Piñero and Pardo Tomás 1996; Varey et al. 2000). This practice of naming was also employed by Linnaeus in the Hortus cliffortianus to specifically honor those which had contributed plants to Clifford's collection (Hagberg 1940, 101–106; Koerner 1995, 251–252). The most prominent figure among these contributors was Hermann Boerhaave “to whose liberality [Clifford's collection] owed more plant specimens than to that of anyone else” (Linnaeus 1737d, 17). Boerhaave had been in the right position to be so liberal: Among his duties as a professor for medicine at Leyden University was that of superintendent for the university garden, in which plants of more than 6000 different kinds were cultivated. The sources for this wealth were various and their tapping had in part already begun at the end of the sixteenth century: During the time of its first superintendent, Carolus Clusius, arrangements had been made with the Dutch East and West India Companies, that sea captains and ship surgeons should bring back living specimens, seeds, or dried specimens of exotic plants from their journeys to the nascent colonies of the Habsburg realm (Stearn 1962, 146). Clusius had also established good relations with Spanish gardeners, receiving seeds from them, and it was thus mainly he who was responsible for the first introduction of South-American plant material into central Europe (López Piñero and López Terrada 1997). Some amount of material would also be ordered specifically from overseas trading posts, as in 1719 when Boerhaave requested specimens from Surinam to substitute items collected by Prince Maurits von Hessen in Brasil which had decayed due to humidity in the garden's “rariteytcamer” (Heniger 1971, 18). A considerable part of material finally came from individual correspondents who either traveled the colonies for some time, or held official posts there. Through such channels a small herbarium containing specimens collected in Surinam would reach Paul Hermann in his later position as superintendent of the Leyden garden (Wijnands 1988, 273). The activities of such correspondents could reach enormous dimensions: Thus Hendrik Adriaan van Reede tot Drakenstein, governor of the Dutch possessions in Malabar since 1669, engaged Paul Hermann to travel the southern coast of India and Ceylon from 1670–1677 as a medical officer of the West Indian Company and to collect, dry, describe, and draw plants during his trip. In this, Hermann enjoyed the assistance of a network of local collaborators including no less than 16 Brahminic scholars and four local artists (Burkill 1953, 849–852; Stearn 1988, 779; Heniger 1986). Prince Maurits van Nassau's botanical activities in Brazil reached a similar scale (Boogaart 1979).

The resources thus amassed in the Leyden garden were used to further multiply its collection by exchanging duplicate material (seeds, living plants, dried specimens), to a large degree reproduced in the garden itself, for “new” material from other collectors, individual and institutional (Stearn 1962 calls the Leyden garden the “mother of all gardens”). Thus official contracts were placed for a regular exchange with the Amsterdam municipal garden, which for a time had directly been involved in the agricultural and horticultural development of the Surinam colony (Wijnands 1988, 72), or with the Chelsea Physick Garden near London, which paid individual collectors in the Americas (Stearn 1961, lxxiii-lxxix; cf. Stearn 1962). Botanical gardens began to form a “garden circuit,” within which a large-scale and continuous exchange of locally reproduced plant material – seeds, living, and dried specimens – was realized (Wijnands 1988, 72–74). Taking into consideration that Clifford, in his position as director of the East India Company, had considerable political and financial power – thus, e.g., being able to let Linnaeus act as a temporary plant agent for his collection on trips to France and England – it is not surprising that he occupied an important position within this circuit, such that the great majority of his herbarium sheets should carry the handwriting of the leading botanists and gardeners of his time, as foremost Boerhaave (Wijnands and Heniger 1991). Clifford had something to return in terms of “new” species for the services he enjoyed, as is evident from the “Index Seminum Satorum” in which Boerhaave registered from whom he had received the seeds sown out in the Leyden garden. According to this list he had received seeds for 42 different plants from Clifford (Heniger 1971, 75).

Living and dried plant specimens, procured, accumulated, and reproduced on a vast historical, geographical and social scale, and, accordingly, stemming from the most diverse cultural and natural contexts, had thus been assembled in Clifford's garden in a movement which, following Latour (1987, 219–223), may be aptly called a “cycle of accumulation.” Two important qualifications are in place in this respect, however:

• 1) Each of the specimens had ended up in Clifford's garden with its own, highly idiosyncratic trajectory of repeated translations behind it, which could not be controlled to the extent of being strictly standardized – trajectories of natural history exploration analogous, though not necessarily similar, to the ones discussed in the preceding section for two Laplandic plants collected by Linnaeus, Andromeda and Linnaea. While the specimens themselves, especially herbarium specimens, at least to some extent moved as “immutable mobiles” through the garden circuit, they would nevertheless be invested with different meanings depending on the context, and thus excite very different representations (cf. Spary 2000, 96–98). In the case of seeds and living exemplars, even direct changes of the objects through horticultural reproduction under varying circumstances had to be expected (Müller-Wille 2001a). In these two respects, one could speak of specimens as “mutating mobiles” as mobile and combinable elements that may and do change in unforeseen directions.
• 2) The accumulation of specimens did not so much result from a capitalization on the ebb and flow movement of standardized inscriptions and disciplined personnel equipped with ever more sophisticated inscriptions from the center to the periphery and back, but to a larger extent from a capitalization on exchange among individual and institutional collectors, where those who were in the position to offer many “new” specimens in return would attract even more “new” specimens, thus being able to offer even more, thus attracting more again, etc. (for a detailed analysis of the mechanisms of this exchange in terms of a peculiar version of a “gift economy” see Müller-Wille, in press).

We may now consider the relation in which Clifford's collection, organized and assembled in the way just described, stands to its catalog, the Hortus cliffortianus. At first sight this relation seems to be of an extremely barren and formal nature: The variety of plant specimens present in Clifford's garden is reduced to a mere list of some two-and-a-half thousand species “names,” stating first a generic name and second an adjectival extension of that name adducing a few characters distinguishing the respective species from its congeners (Linnaeus 1737d, Lectori botanico [unpag.]). And as in the case of the list of Vallivare-plants discussed in the previous section, the Hortus cliffortianus makes almost no sense at all without its referents, the specimens. There is, however, a second level to the Hortus cliffortianus, which does after all disclose the full diversity of Clifford's possessions. Each species entry is followed by a list of “synonyms,” containing further species “names” considered “synonymous” with the species “name” in the entry heading and complemented by a literary reference pointing to the source (texts, plates, or herbarium sheets) where that name was used. A guide to the literature is provided in the Hortus cliffortianus under the separate heading of “Bibliotheca cliffortiana” (see Heller 1983, 115–145) and it may thus be induced, that the sources referred to had been accessible to Linnaeus in Clifford's library while he compiled the Hortus cliffortianus.

On the whole then, the Hortus cliffortianus is not simply a catalog of Clifford's collection, centered systematically upon its proprietor (Baudrillard 1994 discusses collections as “systems” in this sense). The synonymy lists do not refer to books as collectable objects, but conjoin complex sets of textual and pictorial pieces isolated from a historically grown body of literature as offering information on one and the same plant species, on its particular morphology, life-history, ecology, cultural significance, and, as it were, literary tradition. And this conjunction is effected by redistributing botanical information around a multiplicity of centers constituted by the system of Cliffordian specimens – botanical information produced, re-produced, and precipitated in publications alongside the movement of specimens within the “circuit of gardens,” of which Clifford's collection, at a given point in time, represented a momentary state.

To illustrate what this intricate system of cataloging effects, we may once again return to the traces that Andromeda and Linnaea left in it. Among the Andromeda-species listed one finds an entry for “Andromeda foliis alternis lanceolatis, margine reflexis.” The long synonymy list attached identifies this species among others with a “Ledum palustre nostras, arbuti flore” mentioned by John Ray in his Synopsis methodica stirpium Britannicarum (1724, 472), with an “Erica humilis, rosmarini foliis” mentioned in Plukenet's Phytographia (1691, tab. clxxv, fig. 1), and – as a matter of course – with the respective Andromeda-species mentioned in the Flora lapponica (Linnaeus 1737d, 162–163) where this Andromeda-species' life history is related in terms of classical mythology (see above).

Even including such seemingly eccentric pieces, the synonymy list thus identifies and correlates various sources of information on a certain species to form a concatenated series of representations that are as widely different in content as in origin. The same can be shown for references to pictorial information contained in the synonymy lists (fig. 6): The oldest pictorial representation of Linnaea is in Caspar Bauhin's Prodromus Theatri Botanici (1620), and features a “stalk with flowers” collected by Bauhin and his brother Johan in the Alps (Bauhin 1620, 35) in a somewhat entangled state, the little flowers hardly discernible. This is distinctly a naturalistic presentation of the plant's habitus, more naturalistic indeed than the second one from Rudbeck's Index plantarum in Laponica observavit of 1724, again produced from a dried specimen, excavated by Rudbeck in Lapland, but, in contrast to Bauhin, shown with spread out parts to allow for a “much more accurate picture” (Rudbeck jun. 1724, 96), which, as was seen in the last section, would later serve as an emblem for the Laplandic flora. Finally, the plate of Linnaea in Linnaeus' Flora lapponica is referred to, which exhibits the stalk in a more natural position again, but sets apart the flower parts to expose their supposedly characteristic morphologic features (Linnaeus 1737b, 207). Stemming from different representational contexts, but equally referred to the species represented by the Linnaea-specimen in Clifford's collection, none of these illustrations can actually be said to simply supersede the other. Rather, they are equated by their common relation to a specimen, thus interacting with and mutually elucidating each other and rendering a fragmented but nevertheless rich or “thick” picture of that plant species' peculiar habitus, composition, morphology, and range of variability.

The effect of synonymy lists is thus trivial, but important: What at face value appears to be straightforwardly different in terms of origin, appearance, significance etc., is rendered as being different aspects of one and the same object. The effect is a “man made uniformity” of the plant world, as William T. Stearn (1988, 781) has put it, in which plants from origins spanning widely across the continents can be found under one and the same generic or specific heading. Thus, e.g. information on Laplandic plants is found dispersed all over the Hortus cliffortianus, together with information on plants of quite different origin. The Laplandic flora, so to speak, is dissolved in the mass of plant species present in Clifford's collection. To give just one especially telling example: The text accompanying Bauhin's illustration of Linnaea had maintained that Joachim Burser “communicated a similar” plant to Bauhin “born on the Brazilian Island of Topinambault” (Bauhin 1620, 35). This information is reiterated in the Hortus cliffortianus (Linnaeus 1737d, 321), and without any hesitation Linnaeus thus equated a plant serving as a symbol for the boreal flora (and, as it were, Linnaeus' own nothern origin) with a plant supposedly stemming from tropical South America. Both the inhabitants of Lapland and Topinambou had served the eighteenth century quite commonly to point to the exotic extremes of humanity (see e.g. Swift [1729] 1969, 17). To have a plant of such wide geographic distribution named after him indicated Linnaeus' mastery of matters botanical.¹³

Now, such equations of plants of widely distinct origin were not mere mental acts: just as Bauhin (as he expressly stated) had had access to some of the material collected by Burser, so did Linnaeus and Rudbeck, as Burser's herbarium had ended up in the library of Uppsala University due to the military engagement of Charles X in 1657–1658 (Stearn 1957, 116). Burser, Bauhin, Rudbeck, and finally Linnaeus, notwithstanding their geographical and historical detachment, could commonly refer to a stock of specimens moving within the “circuit of gardens” and exciting various attempts at their reproduction or representation (as Swiss, Laplandian, and Brazilian plants, e.g.) and it was this circulation of material – translation in a first sense – that formed the common ground for regarding the various outcomes of such attempts, material, textual, pictorial, as pertaining to one and the same plant species – translation in a second sense.

It is this two-tiered system of translations that extends from the “garden circuit” into the center with the method of “collation” described in the Genera plantarum. As we saw above, “collation” isolates features which distinguish a genus universally by letting various specimens of that genus stand in for each other and by recording only those features that remain identical throughout these permutations. In a sense, the procedure exchanges one species' representation for the other to see in what respects they can be regarded as exchangeable and in what respects not. Something similar happens in botanical exchange, though on a much vaster scale: This exchange, and its cumulative nature, depends on successfully producing something “new” for the recipient. But specimens will be accepted as representing “new” kinds only if the features presumably distinguishing them remain distinctive under their translation from one context to the other. The movement of plant specimens in the “circuit of gardens” thus sets apart those variables that are dependent on particular contexts from those that are not, which are “stable” instead of “variable.” And this behavior is constantly monitored by botanists in the inscriptions they produce from specimens, most notably in the proliferation of diagnostic names and diagnostic systems (cf. Daudin 1926, 26–27), but also in species descriptions which may expressly state changes due to the transport of living specimens from one place to the other. It is in this sense, as a record of the changes specimens underwent while being exchanged and reproduced in and among botanical gardens, that Linnaeus should begin to speak of the “history” of a species (Müller-Wille 2001c).

A final publication by Linnaeus in 1737, the Critica botanica, uses the historical experience gathered in this respect to sift botanical definitions so far produced for “constant,” “reliable,” and “certain” characters against “deceitful,” “accidental,” and “swaying” ones. Thus “time of flowering and germinating is a very deceitful difference” as “Colchicum autumnale, which always flowers in autumn in [central] Europe,” transferred to Lapland “flowered in August in the first, and in June in the second and third year” (Linnaeus 1737e, 172). “Colour counts nothing in differences” as it is “certain that blue, red, purple and violet colours easily change into white”; “Use supplies the Botanist with a vain difference,” as “many [plants] are officinal plants in one region, but not in others” (ibid. 183); etc. In contrast to that, “certain” characters, notably the number, shape, position, and proportion of flower parts, are observed to be constant and reproducible in all possible botanical transactions, including the representation of plants in various media. As summed up by Linnaeus:

This separation of “mechanical” and “accidental” attributes on the basis of translation in exchange is the fundamental abstraction of Linnaean botany, laying the ground for its concept of organic reproduction (Müller-Wille 1998), its species concept (Müller-Wille 2001a), and its concept of an “economy of nature” (Müller-Wille in press). Most notably, for our purposes here, it provides the background knowledge by which the “collation of species” becomes an almost mechanical procedure: One starts with a given specimen or representation, describes its morphology in terms of those variables which had sedimented in the “garden circuit” as reliably distinctive, moves to another specimen or representation judged to belong to that same genus, rules out features from the original description which turn out to differ among the two, moves on to a further specimen, and so on. Linnaeus should later, in his textbook for botany, the Philosophia botanica, describe the fashioning of a “natural character” in this sense also: “The natural definition is made from a most accurate description of a first species. All the other species are compared with the first species of the genus. If all deviating features are excluded, it will at last become elaborated.” The important point about this procedure is, that it is neither “merely” empirical, nor “purely” logical.¹⁴

The procedure does not become a matter of some kind of “logic” as the stability of features is wholly contingent on the respective contexts in which specimens are produced or reproduced. Nor is it a merely empirical matter, as it will always depend on the mobilization of plants through technologies of isolation, stabilization, and inscription, in short, technologies of real abstraction – an insight Linnaeus expressed as follows: