At the start of the eighteenth century the same plant went by different names in different countries, and those names were often sentence-length: a Latin name describing a species could run to a dozen words. The colonial collections flooding into Europe made the disorder unmanageable — the problem the Uppsala botanist Carl von Linné solved was not nature itself but the way of speaking about it.

Published in 1735 as a slim table, Systema Naturae placed living things into class, order, genus and species; with Species Plantarum in 1753 and the tenth edition of 1758, binomial nomenclature was applied to all plants and animals. The name Homo sapiens appears in that edition. The system separated naming from description: a name no longer characterises a species, it only points to it in a fixed way. That separation made it possible to compare a beetle from Japan with one from Peru inside a single frame.

Linnaeus's classification was, in its first form, artificial — it divided plants by the number of their reproductive organs, aiming at usability rather than kinship. A century later Darwin argued that the same hierarchy in fact reflected a tree of descent from common ancestors, turning a practical cataloguing device into the evidential ground of evolution. That is the part of the system that survives. His division of humans into four 'varieties' with temperaments attached did not: it counts among the early supports of scientific racism and was wholly invalidated by genetic data in the twentieth century.