Pehr Kalm - Legacy

Legacy

Kalm's journal of his travels was published as En Resa til Norra America (Stockholm, 1753–1761). It was translated into German, Dutch, and French, and into English in 1770 as Travels into North America. Kalm described not only the flora and fauna of the New World, but the lives of the Native Americans and the British and French colonists whom he met.

An American edition was translated by Swedish-American scholar and literary historian Adolph B. Benson (1881–1961). It was published as Peter Kalm's Travels in North America: The English Version of 1770 (Wilson-Erickson Inc. 1937). It has become an important standard reference regarding life in colonial North America and has been in continuous print in several updated editions. Kalm's paper on the life cycle of the North American 17-year periodical cicada, Magicicada septendecim, was the first published scientific description of the species and its recurrent appearances.

In his Species Plantarum, Linnaeus cites Kalm for 90 species, 60 of them new, including the genus Kalmia, which Linnaeus named after Kalm. Kalmia latifolia (Mountain-laurel) is the state flower of Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

Kalm's ethnicity and mother tongue became a topic almost a century after his death, during Finland's so-called language strife. Kalm himself usually signed letters as "Pehr Kalm", and he was born and raised in the bi-cultural and bi-lingual Finland-Swedish Närpes, and all his known professional writings were done in Latin and Swedish. Another famous Swedish scientist from territories that later became Finland, Anders Chydenius, was a student of Pehr Kalm's.

The standard author abbreviation Kalm is used to indicate this individual as the author when citing a botanical name.