Portrait of Carl Linnaeus (1707 - 1778), a Swedish botanist. Linnaeus was the founder of the modern taxonomy, or the classification system for animals and plants. He divided flowering plants into classes according to there stamens and orders according to the number of pistils in "Systema Naturae", The Natural World, which was published in 1735. In 1749, he invented the binomial nomenclature by which each plant was given a latin generic noun followed by a specific adjective. Linnaeus opposed the evolutionary theory that no new species had been formed since Creation and none had become extinct. Colored Version of BD4696.