Carolus Linnaeus. Portrait of Carolus Linnaeus, (1707-78), Swedish botanist, as a young man. This name was Latinised from his Swedish name, Carl von Linne. Linnaeus was a great classifier of living organisms. In 1735 he published Systema Naturae (The Natural World), in which he divided flowering plants into classes ordered according to the structure of their sexual organs. In 1749 he introduced the binomial nomenclature by which each plant was given a latin generic noun followed by a specific adjective. His work became the foundation of modern taxomony. Linnaeus opposed evolutionary theory, believing all species had been fixed since the Earth's Creation.