History of botany

The history of botany examines the human effort to understand life on Earth by tracing the historical development of the discipline of botany—that part of natural science dealing with organisms traditionally treated as plants.

Rudimentary botanical science began with empirically based plant lore passed from generation to generation in the oral traditions of paleolithic hunter-gatherers. The first written records of plants were made in the Neolithic Revolution about 10,000 years ago as writing was developed in the settled agricultural communities where plants and animals were first domesticated. The first writings that show human curiosity about plants themselves, rather than the uses that could be made of them, appear in ancient Greece and ancient India. In Ancient Greece, the teachings of Aristotle's student Theophrastus at the Lyceum in ancient Athens in about 350 BC are considered the starting point for Western botany. In ancient India, the Vŗkşăyurvĕda, attributed to Parăśara, is also considered one of the earliest texts to describe various branches of botany.

In Europe, botanical science was soon overshadowed by a medieval preoccupation with the medicinal properties of plants that lasted more than 1000 years. During this time, the medicinal works of classical antiquity were reproduced in manuscripts and books called herbals. In China and the Arab world, the Greco-Roman work on medicinal plants was preserved and extended.

In Europe the Renaissance of the 14th–17th centuries heralded a scientific revival during which botany gradually emerged from natural history as an independent science, distinct from medicine and agriculture. Herbals were replaced by floras: books that described the native plants of local regions. The invention of the microscope stimulated the study of plant anatomy, and the first carefully designed experiments in plant physiology were performed. With the expansion of trade and exploration beyond Europe, the many new plants being discovered were subjected to an increasingly rigorous process of naming, description, and classification.

Progressively more sophisticated scientific technology has aided the development of contemporary botanical offshoots in the plant sciences, ranging from the applied fields of economic botany (notably agriculture, horticulture and forestry), to the detailed examination of the structure and function of plants and their interaction with the environment over many scales from the large-scale global significance of vegetation and plant communities (biogeography and ecology) through to the small scale of subjects like cell theory, molecular biology and plant biochemistry.

Introduction

Botany ( Greek - grass, fodder; Medieval Latin ' – herb, plant) and zoology are, historically, the core disciplines of biology whose history is closely associated with the natural sciences chemistry, physics and geology. A distinction can be made between botanical science in a pure sense, as the study of plants themselves, and botany as applied science, which studies the human use of plants. Early natural history divided pure botany into three main streams morphology-classification, anatomy and physiology – that is, external form, internal structure, and functional operation. The most obvious topics in applied botany are horticulture, forestry and agriculture although there are many others like weed science, plant pathology, floristry, pharmacognosy, economic botany and ethnobotany which lie outside modern courses in botany. Since the origin of botanical science there has been a progressive increase in the scope of the subject as technology has opened up new techniques and areas of study. Modern molecular systematics, for example, entails the principles and techniques of taxonomy, molecular biology, computer science and more.

Within botany there are a number of sub-disciplines that focus on particular plant groups, each with their own range of related studies (anatomy, morphology etc.). Included here are: phycology (algae), pteridology ( ferns), bryology ( mosses and liverworts) and palaeobotany (fossil plants) and their histories are treated elsewhere (see side bar). To this list can be added mycology, the study of fungi, which were once treated as plants, but are now ranked as a unique kingdom.

Ancient knowledge

Nomadic hunter-gatherer societies passed on, by oral tradition, what they knew (their empirical observations) about the different kinds of plants that they used for food, shelter, poisons, medicines, for ceremonies and rituals etc. The uses of plants by these pre-literate societies influenced the way the plants were named and classified—their uses were embedded in folk-taxonomies, the way they were grouped according to use in everyday communication. The nomadic life-style was drastically changed when settled communities were established in about twelve centres around the world during the Neolithic Revolution which extended from about 10,000 to 2500 years ago depending on the region. With these communities came the development of the technology and skills needed for the domestication of plants and animals and the emergence of the written word provided evidence for the passing of systematic knowledge and culture from one generation to the next.

Plant lore and plant selection

During the Neolithic Revolution plant knowledge increased most obviously through the use of plants for food and medicine. All of today's staple foods were domesticated in prehistoric times as a gradual process of selection of higher-yielding varieties took place, possibly unknowingly, over hundreds to thousands of years. Legumes were cultivated on all continents but cereals made up most of the regular diet: rice in East Asia, wheat and barley in the Middle east, and maize in Central and South America. By Greco-Roman times popular food plants of today, including grapes, apples, figs, and olives, were being listed as named varieties in early manuscripts. Botanical authority William Stearn has observed that "''cultivated plants are mankind's most vital and precious heritage from remote antiquity''".

It is also from the Neolithic, in about 3000 BC, that we glimpse the first known illustrations of plants and read descriptions of impressive gardens in Egypt. However protobotany, the first pre-scientific written record of plants, did not begin with food; it was born out of the medicinal literature of Egypt, China, Mesopotamia and India. Botanical historian Alan Morton notes that agriculture was the occupation of the poor and uneducated, while medicine was the realm of socially influential shamans, priests, apothecaries, magicians and physicians, who were more likely to record their knowledge for posterity.

Early botany

;Ancient India
An early example of ancient Indian plant classification is found in the Rigveda, a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns from about 3700–3100 BP. Plants are divided into ' (trees), ' (herbs useful to humans) and ' (creepers), with further subdivisions. The sacred Hindu text Atharvaveda divides plants into eight classes: ' (spreading branches), ' (leaves with long clusters), ' (bushy plants), ' (which expands); ' (those with monopodial growth), ' (creeping plants), ' (with many stalks), and ' (plants with knotty joints). The Taittiriya Samhita classifies the plant kingdom into ', ' and ' (trees), ' (shrubs with spreading branches), ' (herbs), ' (spreading plant), ' (climber), ' (bushy plant), ' (creeper), and ' (spreading on the ground). Other examples of early Indian taxonomy include Manusmriti, the Law book of Hindus, which classifies plants into eight major categories. Elaborate taxonomies also occur in the Charaka Samhitā, Sushruta Samhita and Vaisesika.

;Ancient China
In ancient China lists of different plants and herb concoctions for pharmaceutical purposes date back to at least the time of the Warring States (481 BC-221 BC). Many Chinese writers over the centuries contributed to the written knowledge of herbal pharmaceutics. The Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD) includes the notable work of the Huangdi Neijing and the famous pharmacologist Zhang Zhongjing. There were also the 11th century scientists and statesmen Su Song and Shen Kuo who compiled learned treatises on natural history, emphasising herbal medicine.

Theophrastus and the origin of botanical science

Ancient Athens, of the 6th century BC, was the busy trade centre at the confluence of Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Minoan cultures at the height of Greek colonisation of the Mediterranean. The philosophical thought of this period ranged freely through many subjects. Empedocles (490–430 BC) foreshadowed Darwinian evolutionary theory in a crude formulation of the mutability of species and natural selection. The physician Hippocrates (460–370 BC) avoided the prevailing superstition of his day and approached healing by close observation and the test of experience. At this time a genuine non-anthropocentric curiosity about plants emerged. The major works written about plants extended beyond the description of their medicinal uses to the topics of plant geography, morphology, physiology, nutrition, growth and reproduction.

Foremost among the scholars studying botany was Theophrastus of Eressus ( Greek: ; c. 371–287 BC) who has been frequently referred to as the "Father of Botany". He was a student and close friend of Aristotle (384–322 BC) and succeeded him as head of the Lyceum (an educational establishment like a modern university) in Athens with its tradition of peripatetic philosophy. Aristotle's special treatise on plants — — is now lost, although there are many botanical observations scattered throughout his other writings (these have been assembled by Christian Wimmer in ', 1836) but they give little insight into his botanical thinking. The Lyceum prided itself in a tradition of systematic observation of causal connections, critical experiment and rational theorizing. Theophrastus challenged the superstitious medicine employed by the physicians of his day, called rhizotomi, and also the control over medicine exerted by priestly authority and tradition. Together with Aristotle he had tutored Alexander the Great whose military conquests were carried out with all the scientific resources of the day, the Lyceum garden probably containing many botanical trophies collected during his campaigns as well as other explorations in distant lands. It was in this garden where he gained much of his plant knowledge.

Theophrastus's major botanical works were the ''Enquiry into Plants'' (''Historia Plantarum'') and ''Causes of Plants'' (''Causae Plantarum'') which were his lecture notes for the Lyceum. The opening sentence of the ''Enquiry'' reads like a botanical manifesto: "''We must consider the distinctive characters and the general nature of plants from the point of view of their morphology, their behaviour under external conditions, their mode of generation and the whole course of their life''". The ''Enquiry'' is 9 books of "applied" botany dealing with the forms and classification of plants and economic botany, examining the techniques of agriculture (relationship of crops to soil, climate, water and habitat) and horticulture. He described some 500 plants in detail, often including descriptions of habitat and geographic distribution, and he recognised some plant groups that can be recognised as modern-day plant families. Some names he used, like '' Crataegus'', '' Daucus'' and '' Asparagus'' have persisted until today. His second book ''Causes of Plants'' covers plant growth and reproduction (akin to modern physiology). Like Aristotle he grouped plants into "trees", "undershrubs", "shrubs" and "herbs" but he also made several other important botanical distinctions and observations. He noted that plants could be annuals, perennials and biennials, they were also either monocotyledons or dicotyledons and he also noticed the difference between determinate and indeterminate growth and details of floral structure including the degree of fusion of the petals, position of the ovary and more. These lecture notes of Theophrastus comprise the first clear exposition of the rudiments of plant anatomy, physiology, morphology and ecology — presented in a way that would not be matched for another eighteen centuries.

Meanwhile, the study of medicinal plants was not being neglected and a full synthesis of ancient Greek pharmacology was compiled in ''Materia Medica'' c. 60 AD by Pedanius Dioscorides (c. 40-90 AD) who was a Greek physician with the Roman army. This work proved to be the definitive text on medicinal herbs, both oriental and occidental, for fifteen hundred years until the dawn of the European Renaissance being slavishly copied again and again throughout this period. Though rich in medicinal information with descriptions of about 600 medicinal herbs, the botanical content of the work was extremely limited.

Ancient Rome

The Romans contributed little to the foundations of botanical science laid by the ancient Greeks, but made a sound contribution to our knowledge of applied botany as agriculture. In works titled ' four Roman writers contributed to a compendium ''Scriptores Rei Rusticae'', published from the Renaissance on, which set out the principles and practice of agriculture. These authors were Cato (234–149 BC), Varro (116–27 BC) and, in particular, Columella (4–70 AD) and Palladius (4th century AD). Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) deals with plants in Books 12 to 26 of his 37-volume highly influential work ' in which he frequently quotes Theophrastus but with a lack of botanical insight although he does, nevertheless, draw a distinction between true botany on the one hand, and farming and medicine on the other. It is estimated that at the time of the Roman Empire between 1300 and 1400 plants had been recorded in the West.

Medieval knowledge

Medicinal plants of the early Middle Ages

In Western Europe, after Theophrastus, botany passed through a bleak period of 1800 years when little progress was made and, indeed, many of the early insights were lost. As Europe entered the Middle Ages (5th to 15th centuries), China, India and the Arab world enjoyed a golden age. Chinese philosophy had followed a similar path to that of the ancient Greeks. The Chinese dictionary-encyclopaedia Erh Ya probably dates from about 300 BC and describes about 334 plants classed as trees or shrubs, each with a common name and illustration. Between 100 and 1700 AD many new works on pharmaceutical botany were produced including encyclopaedic accounts and treatises compiled for the Chinese imperial court. These were free of superstition and myth with carefully researched descriptions and nomenclature; they included cultivation information and notes on economic and medicinal uses — and even elaborate monographs on ornamental plants. But there was no experimental method and no analysis of the plant sexual system, nutrition, or anatomy.

The 400-year period from the 9th to 13th centuries AD was the Islamic Renaissance, a time when Islamic culture and science thrived. Greco-Roman texts were preserved, copied and extended although new texts always emphasised the medicinal aspects of plants. Kurdish biologist Ābu Ḥanīfah Āḥmad ibn Dawūd Dīnawarī (828–896 AD) is known as the founder of Arabic botany; his ''Kitâb al-nabât'' ('Book of Plants') describes 637 species, discussing plant development from germination to senescence and including details of flowers and fruits. The Mutazilite philosopher and physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (c. 980–1037 AD) was another influential figure, his '' The Canon of Medicine'' being a landmark in the history of medicine treasured until the Enlightenment.

In India simple artificial plant classification systems of the Rigveda, Atharvaveda and Taittiriya Samhita became more botanical with the work of Parashara (c. 400 – c. 500 AD), the author of ''Vṛksayurveda'' (the science of life of trees). He made close observations of cells and leaves and divided plants into Dvimatrka (Dicotyledons) and Ekamatrka (Monocotyledons). The dicotyledons were further classified into groupings (ganas) akin to modern floral families: ''Samiganiya'' ( Fabaceae), ''Puplikagalniya'' ( Rutaceae), ''Svastikaganiya'' (Cruciferae), ''Tripuspaganiya'' (Cucurbitaceae), ''Mallikaganiya'' (Apocynaceae), and ''Kurcapuspaganiya'' (Asteraceae). Important medieval Indian works of plant physiology include the ''Prthviniraparyam'' of Udayana, ''Nyayavindutika'' of Dharmottara, ''Saddarsana-samuccaya'' of Gunaratna, and ''Upaskara'' of Sankaramisra.

The Silk Road

Following the fall of Constantinople (1453), the newly expanded Ottoman Empire welcomed European embassies in its capital, which in turn became the sources of plants from those regions to the east which traded with the empire. In the following century twenty times as many plants entered Europe along the Silk Road as had been transported in the previous two thousand years, mainly as bulbs. Others were acquired primarily for their alleged medicinal value. Initially Italy benefited from this new knowledge, especially Venice, which traded extensively with the East. From there these new plants rapidly spread to the rest of Western Europe. By the middle of the sixteenth century there was already a flourishing export trade of various bulbs from Turkey to Europe.

The Age of Herbals

In the European Middle Ages of the 15th and 16th centuries the lives of European citizens were based around agriculture but when printing arrived, with movable type and woodcut illustrations, it was not treatises on agriculture that were published, but lists of medicinal plants with descriptions of their properties or "virtues". These first plant books, known as herbals showed that botany was still a part of medicine, as it had been for most of ancient history. Authors of herbals were often curators of university gardens, and most herbals were derivative compilations of classic texts, especially ''De Materia Medica''. However, the need for accurate and detailed plant descriptions meant that some herbals were more botanical than medicinal. German Otto Brunfels's (1464–1534) ''Herbarum Vivae Icones'' (1530) contained descriptions of about 47 species new to science combined with accurate illustrations. His fellow countryman Hieronymus Bock's (1498–1554) ''Kreutterbuch'' of 1539 described plants he found in nearby woods and fields and these were illustrated in the 1546 edition. However, it was Valerius Cordus (1515–1544) who pioneered the formal botanical description that detailed both flowers and fruits, some anatomy including the number of chambers in the ovary, and the type of ovule placentation. He also made observations on pollen and distinguished between inflorescence types. His five-volume ''Historia Plantarum'' was published about 18 years after his early death aged 29 in 1561–1563. In Holland Rembert Dodoens (1517–1585), in ''Stirpium Historiae'' (1583), included descriptions of many new species from the Netherlands in a scientific arrangement and in England William Turner (1515–1568) in his ''Libellus De Re Herbaria Novus'' (1538) published names, descriptions and localities of many native British plants.

Herbals contributed to botany by setting in train the science of plant description, classification, and botanical illustration. Up to the 17th century botany and medicine were one and the same but those books emphasising medicinal aspects eventually omitted the plant lore to become modern pharmacopoeias; those that omitted the medicine became more botanical and evolved into the modern compilations of plant descriptions we call Floras. These were often backed by specimens deposited in a herbarium which was a collection of dried plants that verified the plant descriptions given in the Floras. The transition from herbal to Flora marked the final separation of botany from medicine.

The Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment (1550–1800)

The revival of learning during the European Renaissance renewed interest in plants. The church, feudal aristocracy and an increasingly influential merchant class that supported science and the arts, now jostled in a world of increasing trade. Sea voyages of exploration returned botanical treasures to the large public, private, and newly established botanic gardens, and introduced an eager population to novel crops, drugs and spices from Asia, the East Indies and the New World.

The number of scientific publications increased. In England, for example, scientific communication and causes were facilitated by learned societies like Royal Society (founded in 1660) and the Linnaean Society (founded in 1788): there was also the support and activities of botanical institutions like the Jardin du Roi in Paris, Chelsea Physic Garden, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and the Oxford and Cambridge Botanic Gardens, as well as the influence of renowned private gardens and wealthy entrepreneurial nurserymen. By the early 17th century the number of plants described in Europe had risen to about 6000. The 18th century Enlightenment values of reason and science coupled with new voyages to distant lands instigating another phase of encyclopaedic plant identification, nomenclature, description and illustration, "flower painting" possibly at its best in this period of history. Plant trophies from distant lands decorated the gardens of Europe's powerful and wealthy in a period of enthusiasm for natural history, especially botany (a preoccupation sometimes referred to as "botanophilia") that is never likely to recur. Often such exotic new plant imports (primarily from Turkey), when they first appeared in print in English, lacked common names in the language.

During the 18th century botany was one of the few sciences considered appropriate for genteel educated women. Around 1760, with the popularization of the Linnaean system, botany became much more widespread among educated women who painted plants, attended classes on plant classification, and collected herbarium specimens although emphasis was on the healing properties of plants rather than plant reproduction which had overtones of sexuality. Women began publishing on botanical topics and children's books on botany appeared by authors like Charlotte Turner Smith. Cultural authorities argued that education through botany created culturally and scientifically aware citizens, part of the thrust for 'improvement' that characterised the Enlightenment. However, in the early 19th century with the recognition of botany as an official science, women were again excluded from the discipline. Compared to other sciences, however, in botany the number of female researchers, collectors, or illustrators has always been remarkably high.

Botanical gardens and herbaria

Public and private gardens have always been strongly associated with the historical unfolding of botanical science.
Early botanical gardens were physic gardens, repositories for the medicinal plants described in the herbals. As they were generally associated with universities or other academic institutions the plants were also used for study. The directors of these gardens were eminent physicians with an educational role as "scientific gardeners" and it was staff of these institutions that produced many of the published herbals.

The botanical gardens of the modern tradition were established in northern Italy, the first being at Pisa (1544), founded by Luca Ghini (1490–1556). Although part of a medical faculty, the first chair of ', essentially a chair in botany, was established in Padua in 1533. Then in 1534, Ghini became Reader in ' at Bologna University, where Ulisse Aldrovandi established a similar garden in 1568 (see below). Collections of pressed and dried specimens were called a ' (garden of dry plants) and the first accumulation of plants in this way (including the use of a plant press) is attributed to Ghini. Buildings called herbaria housed these specimens mounted on card with descriptive labels. Stored in cupboards in systematic order they could be preserved in perpetuity and easily transferred or exchanged with other institutions, a taxonomic procedure that is still used today.

By the 18th century the physic gardens had been transformed into "order beds" that demonstrated the classification systems that were being devised by botanists of the day — but they also had to accommodate the influx of curious, beautiful and new plants pouring in from voyages of exploration that were associated with European colonial expansion.

From Herbal to Flora

Plant classification systems of the 17th and 18th centuries now related plants to one another and not to man, marking a return to the non-anthropocentric botanical science promoted by Theophrastus over 1500 years before. In England, various herbals in either Latin or English were mainly compilations and translations of continental European works, of limited relevance to the British Isles. This included the rather unreliable work of Gerard (1597). The first systematic attempt to collect information on British plants was that of Thomas Johnson (1629), who was later to issue his own revision of Gerard's work (1633–1636).

However Johnson was not the first apothecary or physician to organise botanical expeditions to systematise their local flora. In Italy Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522 – 1605) organised an expedition to the Sibylline mountains in Umbria in 1557, and compiled a local Flora. He then began to disseminate his findings amongst other European scholars, forming an early network of knowledge sharing "''molti amici in molti luoghi''" (many friends in many places), including Charles de l'Écluse ( Clusius) (1526 – 1609) at Montpellier and Jean de Brancion at Malines. Between them they started developing Latin names for plants, in addition to their common names. The exchange of information and specimens between scholars was often associated with the founding of botanical gardens (above), and to this end Aldrovandi founded one of the earliest at his university in Bologna, the Orto Botanico di Bologna in 1568.

In France, Clusius journeyed throughout most of Western Europe, making discoveries in the vegetable kingdom along the way. He compiled Flora of Spain (1576), and Austria and Hungary (1583). He was the first to propose dividing plants into classes. Meanwhile, in Switzerland, from 1554, Conrad Gessner (1516 – 1565) made regular explorations of the Swiss Alps from his native Zurich and discovered many new plants. He proposed that there were groups or genera of plants. He said that each genus was composed of many species and that these were defined by similar flowers and fruits. This principle of organization laid the groundwork for future botanists. He wrote his important '' Historia Plantarum'' shortly before his death. At Malines, in Flanders he established and maintained the botanical gardens of Jean de Brancion from 1568 to 1573, and first encountered tulips.

This approach coupled with the new Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature resulted in plant encyclopaedias without medicinal information called ''Floras'' that meticulously described and illustrated the plants growing in particular regions. The 17th century also marked the beginning of experimental botany and application of a rigorous scientific method, while improvements in the microscope launched the new discipline of plant anatomy whose foundations, laid by the careful observations of Englishman Nehemiah Grew and Italian Marcello Malpighi, would last for 150 years.

Botanical exploration

More new lands were opening up to European colonial powers, the botanical riches being returned to European botanists for description. This was a romantic era of botanical explorers, intrepid plant hunters and gardener-botanists. Significant botanical collections came from: the West Indies (Hans Sloane (1660–1753)); China (James Cunningham); the spice islands of the East Indies (Moluccas, George Rumphius (1627–1702)); China and Mozambique ( João de Loureiro (1717–1791)); West Africa ( Michel Adanson (1727–1806)) who devised his own classification scheme and forwarded a crude theory of the mutability of species; Canada, Hebrides, Iceland, New Zealand by Captain James Cook's chief botanist Joseph Banks (1743–1820).

Classification and morphology

By the middle of the 18th century the botanical booty resulting from the era of exploration was accumulating in gardens and herbaria – and it needed to be systematically catalogued. This was the task of the taxonomists, the plant classifiers.

Plant classifications have changed over time from "artificial" systems based on general habit and form, to pre-evolutionary "natural" systems expressing similarity using one to many characters, leading to post-evolutionary "natural" systems that use characters to infer evolutionary relationships.

Italian physician Andrea Caesalpino (1519–1603) studied medicine and taught botany at the University of Pisa for about 40 years eventually becoming Director of the Botanic Garden of Pisa from 1554 to 1558. His sixteen-volume ''De Plantis'' (1583) described 1500 plants and his herbarium of 260 pages and 768 mounted specimens still remains. Caesalpino proposed classes based largely on the detailed structure of the flowers and fruit; he also applied the concept of the genus. He was the first to try and derive principles of natural classification reflecting the overall similarities between plants and he produced a classification scheme well in advance of its day. Gaspard Bauhin (1560–1624) produced two influential publications ' (1620) and ' (1623). These brought order to the 6000 species now described and in the latter he used binomials and synonyms that may well have influenced Linnaeus's thinking. He also insisted that taxonomy should be based on natural affinities.

To sharpen the precision of description and classification Joachim Jung (1587–1657) compiled a much-needed botanical terminology which has stood the test of time. English botanist John Ray (1623–1705) built on Jung's work to establish the most elaborate and insightful classification system of the day. His observations started with the local plants of Cambridge where he lived, with the ' (1860) which later expanded to his ', essentially the first British Flora. Although his ' (1682, 1688, 1704) provided a step towards a world Flora as he included more and more plants from his travels, first on the continent and then beyond. He extended Caesalpino's natural system with a more precise definition of the higher classification levels, deriving many modern families in the process, and asserted that all parts of plants were important in classification. He recognised that variation arises from both internal (genotypic) and external environmental (phenotypic) causes and that only the former was of taxonomic significance. He was also among the first experimental physiologists. The ' can be regarded as the first botanical synthesis and textbook for modern botany. According to botanical historian Alan Morton, Ray "influenced both the theory and the practice of botany more decisively than any other single person in the latter half of the seventeenth century". Ray's family system was later extended by Pierre Magnol (1638–1715) and Joseph de Tournefort (1656–1708), a student of Magnol, achieved notoriety for his botanical expeditions, his emphasis on floral characters in classification, and for reviving the idea of the genus as the basic unit of classification.

Above all it was Swedish Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) who eased the task of plant cataloguing. He adopted a sexual system of classification using stamens and pistils as important characters. Among his most important publications were Systema Naturae (1735), Genera Plantarum (1737), and Philosophia Botanica (1751) but it was in his Species Plantarum (1753) that he gave every species a binomial thus setting the path for the future accepted method of designating the names of all organisms. Linnaean thought and books dominated the world of taxonomy for nearly a century. His sexual system was later elaborated by Bernard de Jussieu (1699–1777) whose nephew Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu