Though his work dates from the 1730s, it didn't become widely known in England until the 1760s, just in time to make Linnaeus a kind of father figure to British naturalists. Nowhere was his system embraced with greater enthusiasm (which is why, for one thing, the Linnaean Society has its home in London and not Stockholm).
虽然他的作品早在18世纪30年代已经问世，但到18世纪60年代才在英格兰闻名遐迩，使林奈在英国博物学家的眼里成了个元老式的人物。别处都没有那样热情高涨地采用他的体系（这就是为什么林奈协会设在伦敦而不是设在斯德哥尔摩的原因之一）。

Linnaeus was not flawless. He made room for mythical beasts and "monstrous humans" whose descriptions he gullibly accepted from seamen and other imaginative travelers. Among these were a wild man, Homo ferus, who walked on all fours and had not yet mastered the art of speech, and Homo caudatus, "man with a tail." But then it was, as we should not forget, an altogether more credulous age. Even the great Joseph Banks took a keen and believing interest in a series of reported sightings of mermaids off the Scottish coast at the end of the eighteenth century. For the most part, however, Linnaeus's lapses were offset by sound and often brilliant taxonomy. Among other accomplishments, he saw that whales belonged with cows, mice, and other common terrestrial animals in the order Quadrupedia (later changed to Mammalia), which no one had done before.
林奈不是完美无瑕的。他的作品里收集了怪兽和“怪人”，轻信水手和其他想像力丰富的旅行家的描述。其中有一种野人以四肢走路。还没有掌握语言艺术，是“一种长着尾巴的人类”。但是，我们不该忘记，当时是个很容易受骗上当的时代。18世纪末，接连传说有人在苏格兰沿海看到了美人鱼，连大人物约瑟夫·班克斯也对此很感兴趣，十分相信。不过，总的来说，林奈的差错被他那健全而往往又英明的分类方法抵消了。他取得了许多别的成就。其中，他认为鲸与牛、鼠和其他普通的陆生动物同属四足哺乳动物这个目（后来又改名为哺乳动物）。这是以前没有人做过的。
In the beginning, Linnaeus intended only to give each plant a genus name and a number — Convolvulus 1, Convolvulus 2, and so on — but soon realized that that was unsatisfactory and hit on the binomial arrangement that remains at the heart of the system to this day.
开头的时候，林奈打算以一个属名和一个数字来记录每一种植物——如旋花1号、旋花2号等等。但很快发现这种办法不大令人满意，接着又想出了以双名来分类的办法。直到今天，双名分类法仍是该体系的核心。