Linnaeus examines a pebble on the shore with a notebook open on his knee.

Who gave birth to the flint?

Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), a Swedish naturalist, includes an exclamation by the German mineralogist Johann Friedrich Henckel (1678–1744) in his early survey of the kingdoms of nature. It is addressed to a flint. The ordinary character of the object gives the question its edge. An elaborate crystal or a remarkable fossil might already inspire wonder by its shape. Here a stone one might pick up by the roadside and drop again after a glance is quite enough.

A question inside an ordering of nature

O flint! Flint! Who begot you?

– Carl Linnaeus, Systema naturae, 1735, Regnum lapideum, Obs. 6.[1]

The repeated address briefly interrupts the language of classification. Somebody arranging stones requires features that can be established from the specimen at hand. Asking about its parentage demands another kind of knowledge. The surface can tell us something about what we hold. Where this particular piece came from, how long it travelled and how it acquired its present appearance are harder matters to read from its surface. The sudden passage into direct speech brings the reader surprisingly close to the unfamiliar object.

The difficulty of accounting for an origin

The way the question reached us matters too. We encounter it here because Linnaeus included it in his observations on the mineral kingdom and attached Henckel's name to it. Two investigators with different purposes are therefore present. One gives wonder a voice. The other finds a place for that voice in a systematic account. By recording the question Linnaeus makes the distance between naming a thing and explaining its origin part of what can be known about stones.