23/05/2026
23 May — from Waterloo to the naming of nature
On 23 May 1846, Ensign Charles Ewart died. Born near Kilmarnock in 1769, he joined the Royal North British Dragoons, better known as the Scots Greys, at the age of 20.
At the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815, the 45-year-old sergeant captured the regimental eagle of the French 45th Regiment of the Line — one of the most famous trophies taken that day. Ewart was remembered as an expert rider and swordsman, a man of great physical strength.
Also born on 23 May, in 1707, was Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist who gave science a clear system for naming living things: binomial nomenclature.
That system shaped the world of botany — the kind of structured plant knowledge used by figures such as John Hope at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and later echoed in the scientific world that helped inspire Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.
One date, two very different legacies:
a Scottish cavalryman at Waterloo,
and the language science still uses to name life.
