Commemoration of Carl Linnaeus end of his life in 1778, Carl Linnaeus had become one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe, the first civilian in Sweden to be dubbed a knight of the Order of the Polar Star (1753) and ennobled as Carl von Linné (1761). The Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote during Linnaeus' lifetime: "I know no greater man on earth." The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would later write: "With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly." Swedish author August Strindberg wrote: "Linnaeus was in reality
William Withering "The Larches" on 28 September, he died on 6 October 1799. In 1776, he published "The botanical arrangement of all the vegetables naturally growing in Great Britain", an early and influential British Flora. It was the first in English based on the then new Linnaean taxonomy — a classification of all living things — devised by the eminent Swedish botanist and physician Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778). At the time he was criticised for having produced a bowdlerised version of Linnaeus, deliberately omitting any references to sexual reproduction, out of a desire to protect 'female modesty', notably by the Lichfield Botanical Society.