Linnaeus (later known as "Carl von Linné", after his ennoblement in 1761) published the first edition of in 1735, during his stay in the
Netherlands. As was customary for the
scientific literature of its day, the book was published in
Latin. In it, he outlined his ideas for the
hierarchical classification of the natural world, dividing it into the
animal kingdom (), the
plant kingdom (), and the "
mineral kingdom" (). Linnaeus's lists only about 10,000 species of organisms, of which about 6,000 are plants and 4,236 are animals. According to the historian of botany
William T. Stearn, "Even in 1753, he believed that the number of species of plants in the whole world would hardly reach 10,000; in his whole career, he named about 7,700 species of flowering plants." His
sexual system, where species with the same number of
stamens were treated in the same group, was convenient, but in his view artificial. The tenth edition expanded on these varieties with
behavioral and
cultural traits that the
Linnean Society acknowledges as having cemented
colonial stereotypes and provided one of the foundations for
scientific racism. As a result of the popularity of the work, and the number of new specimens sent to him from around the world, Linnaeus kept publishing new and ever-expanding editions of his work. It grew from 11 very large pages in the first edition (1735) to 2,400 pages in the
12th edition (1766–1768). Also, as the work progressed, he made changes; in the first edition,
whales were classified as
fishes, following the work of Linnaeus' friend and "father of
ichthyology"
Peter Artedi; in the 10th edition, published in 1758, whales were moved into the
mammal class. In this same edition, he introduced two-part names (see
binomen) for animal species, which he had done for plant species (see
binary name) in the 1753 publication of . The system eventually developed into modern
Linnaean taxonomy, a hierarchically organized
biological classification. After Linnaeus' health declined in the early 1770s, publication of editions of went in two directions. Another Swedish scientist,
Johan Andreas Murray, issued the section separately in 1774 as the , confusingly labelled the 13th edition. Meanwhile, a 13th edition of the entire appeared in parts between 1788 and 1793. It was as the that Linnaeus' work became widely known in England following translation from the Latin by the
Lichfield Botanical Society, as
A System of Vegetables (1783–1785). == Taxonomy ==