Being a surgical college does not mean that the RCSI Heritage Collections only has material relating to surgery. Centuries ago when anatomy, surgery and medicine were being discovered and studied, zoology, botany and chemistry were in the mix too. Now this was a time when different classes or species of organisms, plants and animals hadn't been discovered. Here's the science bit; the taxonomy of living organisms is the science of describing, identifying, naming and classifying these organisms. The formal system of naming living things by giving them a name made of two parts is called binomial nomenclature. So for example an African elephant has the binomial nomenclature is Loxodonta africana , a honey badger's is Mellivora capensis and a chestnut tree is Castanea sativa . So who was the genius who said 'Here why don't we divide these plants and animals into different classes and make things easier for ourselves when studying them?' It was Carl Linnaeus...