Swedish Botanist Invents Taxonomy Based on What Plants Smell Like, Immediately Regrets It

Okay, so picture this: it’s the mid-1700s, and everyone’s got syphilis and a powdered wig, including one Carl Linnaeus. In our timeline, this Swedish egghead gets a massive hard-on for cataloging every living thing by counting its floral dicks and cunts—stamens and pistils, for you delicate flowers. But what if, instead of being a genital-obsessed weirdo, he was a *smell-obsessed* weirdo? Welcome, fuckers, to the world where binomial nomenclature got shoved aside for the *Systema Odorata*, the Aromatic System of All Creation.

Instead of the elegant Latin of *Homo sapiens*, we’d be *Cheiro de flatulentiae post brassicam*—the “Scent of Post-Cabbage Flatulence.” The entire project was, according to the apocryphal *Letters to a Young Botanist*, inspired by a three-day bender in a Dutch brothel, after which Linnaeus declared, “Every living thing, from the lowest fungus to the King of France, has its own unique funk!” He proposed a seven-tiered system of smells: Musky, Ambrosial, Horny, Feculent, Nauseating, Terrifying, and “Vaguely Disappointing.” Lions were classed as Musky-Terrifying. Roses were Ambrosial-Horny. His scientific rival, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was personally cataloged as Feculent-Vaguely-Disappointing, a sick burn that apparently led to a duel involving perfume atomizers at twenty paces.

This, as you can imagine, was a goddamn disaster for Empire. The British East India Company would send desperate communiques back from the tropics: “Have found a tree. Our Grand Nasal Officer claims it smells of ‘Anxious Goat.’ Is this the Cinchona for quinine or the tree the locals call ‘Explosive Diarrhea Wood’?” Entire expeditions were lost because their lead sniffer had a cold that week. The famed naturalist Joseph Banks, upon discovering a new species of acacia in Australia, reportedly described its scent as “like a Parisian philosopher’s fart after a particularly rich cassoulet,” a classification that held for nearly forty years. The herbariums at Kew became less a center for science and more a deranged perfumery, with botanists getting absolutely zooted while huffing racks of dried orchids and arguing whether a particular specimen smelled more of “sadness” or “toast.”

Naturally, the whole stinking enterprise eventually collapsed. A humorless Prussian botanist, probably named something like Günther von Strictanus, pointed out that one man’s “Ambrosial” is another man’s “Nauseating,” and that you can’t build a global empire on vibes. Science, he argued in a terribly dull 900-page treatise, required objectivity, not a good nose and a talent for obscene similes. So the Aromatic System was scrapped. But for one brief, glorious moment in history, the pinnacle of scientific achievement wasn’t a microscope; it was a dude with a magnificent schnoz, taking a deep whiff of a mushroom and declaring, “Yep. That’s ‘Ghost of a Wet Gerbil’ all right.”