''Bibliotheca Botanica'' ("Bibliography of botany", Amsterdam, 1736, Salomen Schouten; 2nd edn., 1751) is a

botany Botany, also called plant science, is the branch of natural science and biology studying plants, especially Plant anatomy, their anatomy, Plant taxonomy, taxonomy, and Plant ecology, ecology. A botanist or plant scientist is a scientist who s ...

book by Swedish

naturalist Natural history is a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. A person who studies natural history is cal ...

Carl Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné,#Blunt, Blunt (2004), p. 171. was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming o ...

(1707–1778). The book was written and published in Amsterdam when Linnaeus was twenty-eight and dedicated to the botanist Johannes Burman (1707–1779). The first edition appeared in 1736 with the full title ''Bibliotheca Botanica recensens libros plus mille de plantis huc usque editos secundum systema auctorum naturale in classes, ordines, genera et species''; it was an elaborate

classification system Classification is the activity of assigning objects to some pre-existing classes or categories. This is distinct from the task of establishing the classes themselves (for example through cluster analysis). Examples include diagnostic tests, identif ...

for his catalogue of books. A digest of ''Bibliotheca Botanica'', which elaborated on the first chapter of the '' Fundamenta Botanica'', is given in Aphorisms 5–52 of the ''Philosophia Botanica''.

Botanical history

The Preface, dated 8 August 1735, on pages 2–19 contains Linnaeus's extended account of botanical history in the form of a botanical analogy; in pages 2–3 Linnaeus lists previous

bibliographer Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''bibliograph ...

s and then gives his account of botanical history leading to a

golden age The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology, particularly the ''Works and Days'' of Hesiod, and is part of the description of temporal decline of the state of peoples through five Ages of Man, Ages, Gold being the first and the one during wh ...

lasting from 1683 to 1703 (see also ''Incrementa Botanices'', Biuur 1753 and ''Reformatio Botanices'', Reftelius, 1762, for other historical notes by Linnaeus). The Preface mentions that ''Bibliotheca Botanica'' was the first part of a planned ''Bibliotheca medica'' (which he did not produce). Linnaean authority Frans Stafleu describes the book:

Botanical bibliographies

The term "methodists" (methodici, equivalent to present-day systematists) was coined by Linnaeus in his ''Bibliotheca Botanica'' to denote the authors who care about the principles of classification in contrast to the collectors who are concerned primarily with the description of plants paying little or no attention to their arrangement into genera etc. For Linnaeus the important early Methodists were Italian physician and botanist Andrea Caesalpino, the English naturalist

John Ray John Ray Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS (November 29, 1627 – January 17, 1705) was a Christian England, English Natural history, naturalist widely regarded as one of the earliest of the English parson-naturalists. Until 1670, he wrote his ...

, German physician and botanist Augustus Quirinus Rivinus, and a French physician, botanist, and traveller

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (5 June 165628 December 1708) was a French botanist, notable as the first to make a clear definition of the concept of genus for plants. Botanist Charles Plumier was his pupil and accompanied him on his voyages. Li ...

. Botanical bibliography effectively began, as did bibliography in general, with the work of the sixteenth-century Swiss natural historian and polymath Conrad Gesner (1516–1565). His ''Bibliotheca Universalis'', a general compendium of some 12,000 items in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew arranged by authors' forenames, appeared in 1545 as an attempt to bring some order into the rapidly increasing range of literature consequent to the Renaissance and the introduction of printing.Frodin, p. 27. The ''Bibliotheca Botanica'' was the first botanical bibliography arranged by subject. The titles were arranged hierarchically into 16 classes or chapters, each with one or more ordines or sections. Applying this ''methodus naturalis'' to books and people was a mark of his 'scholastic' view of the world. Most subsequent classifications of botanical literature, including geographical entities, would be more or less empirically based highlighting a recurrent conflict between

essentialism Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their Identity (philosophy), identity. In early Western thought, Platonic idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an Theory of forms, "idea" or "f ...

empiricism In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence. It is one of several competing views within epistemology, along ...

nominalism In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. There are two main versions of nominalism. One denies the existence of universals—that which can be inst ...

and other doctrines in the theory and practice of any kind of classification.

Birth of the word biology

Linnaeus employed the Latin term ''biologi'' to refer to botanists who wrote about the life cycle of plants, the first use of the term.

Historical assessment

Heller notes the incomplete coverage of material, incorrect dating of books, and many minor errors in his book descriptions. Also, that his "natural method" of classifying books was "not very practical".

Bibliographic details

Full bibliographic details including exact dates of publication, pagination, editions, facsimiles, brief outline of contents, location of copies, secondary sources, translations, reprints, travelogues, and commentaries are given in Stafleu and Cowan's ''Taxonomic Literature''.Stafleu & Cowan, p. 76.

References

Bibliography

* Frodin, David 2002. ''Guide to Standard Floras of the World, 2nd ed''. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. *Heller, John L. 1970. "Linnaeus’s Bibliotheca Botanica". ''Taxon'' 19: 363–411. * Stafleu, Frans A. 1971. ''Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: the Spreading of their Ideas in Systematic Botany, 1735–1789''. Utrecht: International Association for Plant Taxonomy. . *Stafleu, Frans A. & Cowan, Richard S. 1981. "Taxonomic Literature. A Selective Guide to Botanical Publications with dates, Commentaries and Types. Vol III: Lh–O." ''Regnum Vegetabile'' 105. {{authoritycontrol 1736 non-fiction books 1736 in science 18th-century books in Latin Botanical nomenclature Botany books Carl Linnaeus Biology and natural history in the Dutch Republic History of botany