“Although a seemingly mundane and simple innovation, Linnaeus' use of index cards marks a major shift in how eighteenth-century naturalists thought about the order of nature,” says Mueller-Wille. The natural world was no longer ordered on a fixed, linear scale, but came to be seen as a map-like natural system of multiple affinities.
Ha!
Roughly the idea I'd just written!
The idea of reordering nature this way would have been fantastic, particularly in light of the general prior order of the cosmos based on the scala naturae or Great Chain of Being.
Compare this with Ernst Haeckel's Tree of Man. What year was this in relation? Was the idea of broader biological networks and network-like structure thought of prior to this?