Linnaeus vs Buffon: should nature be filed or set free?

I gave nature a language: kingdom, genus, species, each creature slotted in its rightful drawer for all time.

And in doing so you froze a river, Carl - species blur, vary, and drift across ages your neat boxes cannot hold.

Without my boxes your grand histories are just poetry; a scholar in Tokyo and one in Uppsala can now speak of the same rose.

Better a living poem than a dead catalogue - you named the leaves, Linnaeus, but I dared to describe the forest changing.