Why did Linnaeus compare himself to Adam?

(I'm just speculating here, not having any familiarity (either first-hand or hand-me-down) with any comment Linnaeus offered in explanation of comparing himself to Adam.)

(Let me put that opening disclaimer more simply. I'm just guessing. What I'm about to offer as a possible explanation, is not coming from any real knowledge of any explanation Linnaeus himself may have given; or any other real knowledge of anything an expert on Linnaeus has said.)

That being said, it seems to me there's a fairly obvious reason Linnaeus might have compared himself to Adam. Talking about ADAM, The Bible (Genesis 2:19-20 ESV) says:

[19] Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. [20] The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.

Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish botanist and zoologist, developed the innovative and thoughtful system of naming the many reproductively, structurally, and ecologically distinct types (each of the different "species," as we now call them, thanks to CL) of plants and animals, etc.; and of placing them in a hierarchical system of classification which--with the benefit of some improvements in some of the principles by which biological beings are classified, made possible by advances in our knowledge and understanding of the diversity of forms of life--was received by scientists as a highly useful tool, and is widely used in the biological sciences to this day.

In Linnaeus' system, plants and animals were given binomial (or "two-name") names, the first name giving the genus(the second smallest group of near relations to which a given type of organism is found to belong) of which a type of organism is a reproductively (and structurally, and functionally) distinct type. The second name gives the species to which all the individual plant or animal specimins belong, as first-relations, which allows them to be given a name that so clearly identifies what they are and what they are not that, for nearly all purposes, we humans know what specific animal or plant type we're talking about when they are referred to by their genus and, especially, species names.

Linnaeus clever hiercharchical classificational (taxonomical) system makes it possible to take every living individual creature and say -- according to structural, relational, and evolutionary (many would say) principles -- first what is the largest classificational grouping into which it can knowledgeably be placed (its kingdom, be it plant, animal, or (I think?) protist); and then what successively smaller classicificational groupings it can be found to. The result is a very useful prospective understanding of where a creature type comes in on the tree which represents how closely or distantly-related different animal- or plant- or protist-types, are; how they are branched off from each other, at which point of specialization ... (speaking either of their defining structures, functional modalities, and inter-reproductive viability; or, if you assume the truth of the evolutionary theory of speciation, of the aforementioned traits and a creature-type's path of evolutionary development) ... are more or less general groupings of creatures most insightfully seen as representing alternatives, as creature-types, to their nearest relational groupings.

Apparently, whatever Linnaeus may have called himself, the parallel between the observant, thoughtful, and productive 18th-century Swede, and the First Man of the Genesis-account of the origin of the fully human being (Adam) was striking enough that "The Second Adam" was among the many complimentary sobriquets Linnaeus' eminent admirers dreamed up for him.

So, to state it bluntly (at last!), Linnaeus found himself surveying the vast diversity of distinct creature-types, and, like Adam, deciding--in his extremely compelling genus speciesformat--what they should be called. Whatever names Man/Adam may have originally chosen for the creatures that came before him, after Linnaeus (and his devoted followers), many of us, when we think in terms of a creature's proper name, think: Felis Leo,