In Passage 2, The Author Mentions That The Garden "is Closer To An Explosion" (line 72) In Order To

Previous   /   Next
Monalisha Ghosh 4 Years Ago
163

Previous naturalists (and Linnaeus himself in his youth) had tried to name species by enumerating all of a species distinguishing features. Often these multiword names had to be expanded when similar related species were discovered, and the names differed from author to author and language to language. Naturalists, therefore, had difficulty understanding and building on one another work. It became crucial that every species have the same name in all languages. In using Latic. for naming species, Linnaeus followed the custom of his time, but in reducing the name of each species to two words - the genus, common to every species within the genus, and the species name itself- he made an invaluable break with the past. For instance, a shell with earlier names such as "Marbled Jamaica Murex with Knotty Twirls (Petiver)" became simply Strombus gigas L. ("L" for Linnaeus). Yet the invention of a system of nomenclature, vital as it has come to seem, was trivial by comparison with Linnaeus main achievement: devising a classification system for all organisms, so that scientists no longer had to list every species individually. Linnaeus universally understood classification of species also enabled scientists to retrieve information, make predictions, and understand traits by association. Linnaeus divided each kingdom (animal, vegetable, and mineral) into hierarchies that are still, with some additions, followed today. His classifications reflect an eighteenth-century concept of nature in which all organisms, graded from lower to higher, formed a ladder or "great chain of being," with the human species at the summit. Linnaeus himself would probably have been the first to admit that a classification is only a tool, and not the ultimate purpose, of biological inquiry. Unfortunately, this truth was not apparent to his immediate successors, and for the next hundred years, biologists were to concern themselves almost exclusively with classification. All facts, however trivial, were revered; all theories, however stimulating, were shunned. And the facts with which these naturalists were most concerned were those bearing on the description and classification of species.

 

 Passage 2 

 

A few years ago I stood in a historic place - a neat little eighteenth-century garden, formally divided by gravel walks, with a small wooden house in one comer where the gardens owner had once lived. This garden, which lies in the old Swedish university town of Uppsala, was owned by the warehouse clerk and great indexer of nature, Linnaeus, who between 1730 and 1760 docketed, or attempted to the docket, most of the biological world. Perhaps nothing is more moving at Uppsala than the actual smallness and ordered simplicity of that garden, as compared to the immense consequence that sprang from it in terms of the way humans see and think about the external world. For all its air of gentle peace, this garden is closer to an explosion whose reverberations continue to resonate inside the human brain; it is the place where an intellectual seed landed and has now grown to a tree that shadows the entire globe. I am a heretic about Linnaeus. I do not dispute the value of the tool he gave natural science, but am wary about the change it has effected in the humans  relationship to the world. From Linnaeus on, much of science has been devoted to providing specific labels, to explaining specific mechanisms - to sorting masses into individual entities and arranging the entities neatly. The cost of having so successfully itemized and pigeonholed nature, of being able to name names and explain behaviors, is to limit certain possibilities of seeing and apprehending. For example, the modern human thinks that he or she can best understand a tree (or 1901 species of tree) by examining a single tree. But trees are not intended to grow in isolation. They are social creatures, and their society, in turn, creates or supports other societies of plants, insects, birds, mammals, and microorganisms, all of which make up the whole experience of the woods. The true woods is the sum of all its phenomena. Modem humans have come to adopt the scientific view of the external world as a way of understanding their everyday experience in it. Yet that experience is better understood as a synthesis, a complex interweaving of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, that is hopelessly beyond science powers to analyze. It is quintessentially "wild": irrational, uncontrollable, incalculable. Despite modern humans Linnaeus-like attempts to "garden" everyday experience, to invent disciplining social and intellectual systems for it, in truth it resembles wild nature the green chaos of the woods.  

 In Passage 2, the author mentions that the garden "is closer to an  explosion" (line 72) in order to 

(A) illustrate the impact that Linnaeus fame had on the town of Uppsala

(B) emphasize the influence that Linnaeus has had on human thought

(C) call attention to the profusion of growth in the small garden

(D) note that the seeds that Linnaeus planted in the garden have grown into large trees

(E) express concern about the destructive potential of scientific advancement 

 

asked Jun 25 12:00:00 AM

Monalisha Ghosh

Q: 105 A: 0

0 Answers

Your Answer

Connect With Answers

We are available 24x7 to answer.



+ =


Notification

Your post is submitted for moderation. It will be updated soon.