Summary

On his way back to Sweden, Linnaeus stops in Paris at the Jardin du Roi, the lush royal garden of France. The Jardin was sponsored by King Louis XIII after the Sorbonne refused to modernize its curriculum to include contemporary botanical and medical information. It was a free, public, teaching garden meant to provide hands-on knowledge to students of medicine. France used the Tournefort system of classification, but was not unreceptive to Linnaeus' ideas. In Paris, Linnaeus met with members of the Académie des Sciences, but not Buffon, who was away at the time.

Back in Sweden, Linnaeus moved to Stockholm, where he was received with little acclaim. His work on the sexual classification of plants had been largely rejected by the academic communities in Sweden. To make ends meet, Linnaeus found work primarily as a doctor, treating syphilis and gonorrhea. A...