Species Plantarum

' (Latin for "The Species of Plants") is a book by Carl Linnaeus, originally published in 1753, which lists every species of plant known at the time, classified into genera. It is the first work to consistently apply binomial names and was the starting point for the naming of plants.

Publication

' was published on 1 May 1753 by Laurentius Salvius in Stockholm, in two volumes. A second edition was published in 1762–1763, and a third edition in 1764, although this "scarcely differed" from the second. Further editions were published after Linnaeus' death in 1778, under the direction of Karl Ludwig Willdenow, the director of the Berlin Botanical Garden; the fifth edition was titled "fourth edition" and was published by Willdenow in four volumes, 1798 (1), 1800 (2), 1801 (3¹), 1803 (3²), 1804 (3³), 1805 (4¹), 1806 (4²), rather than the dates printed on the volumes themselves.

Importance

' was the first botanical work to consistently apply the binomial nomenclature system of naming to any large group of organisms (Linnaeus' tenth edition of ' would apply the same technique to animals for the first time in 1758). Prior to this work, a plant species would be known by a long polynomial, such as ' (meaning " plantain with pubescent ovate-lanceolate leaves, a cylindrical spike and a terete scape") or ' (meaning "''Nepeta'' with flowers in a stalked, interrupted spike"). In ', these cumbersome names were replaced with two-part names, consisting of a single-word genus name, and a single-word specific epithet or "trivial name"; the two examples above became '' Plantago media'' and '' Nepeta cataria'', respectively. The use of binomial names had originally been developed as a kind of shorthand in a student project about the plants eaten by cattle.

After the specific epithet, Linnaeus gave a short description of each species, and a synonymy. The descriptions were careful and terse, consisting of few words in small genera; in '' Glycyrrhiza'', for instance, the three species ('' Glycyrrhiza echinata'', '' Glycyrrhiza glabra'' and "''Glycyrrhiza hirsuta''", respectively) were described as "'", "'" and "'".

Because it is the first work in which binomial nomenclature was consistently applied, ' was chosen as the "starting point" for the nomenclature of most plants (the nomenclature of some non-vascular plants and all fungi uses later starting points).

Contents

' contained descriptions of the thousands of plant species known to Linnaeus at the time. In the first edition, there were 5,940 names, from '' Acalypha australis'' to '' Zygophyllum spinosum''. In his introduction, Linnaeus estimated that there were fewer than 10,000 plant species in existence; there are now thought to be around 400,000 species of flowering plants alone.

The species were arranged in around a thousand genera, which were grouped into 24 classes, according to Linnaeus' sexual system of classification. There are no descriptions of the genera in '; these are supplied in the companion volume ' (), the fifth edition of which was printed at a similar time to the first edition of '. Linnaeus acknowledged his "sexual system" was an artificial system, rather than one which accurately reflects shared ancestry, but the system's simplicity made it easier for non-specialists to rapidly find the correct class, being based on simple counts of floral parts such as stigmas and stamens.

Notes

References

Bibliography

*
** ''Species Plantarum''
vol. 1vol. 2
at Biodiversity Heritage Library facsimile
** ''Species Plantarum''
vol. 1vol. 2
at Botanicus
*
* ''Species Plantarum'' at Project Gutenbergbr>I–IIIIV–VVI–XXI–XIII
text

Linnaeus Link Union Catalogue

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1753 non-fiction books
Botanical nomenclature
Florae (publication)
Botany books
Carl Linnaeus
1753 in science
18th-century books in Latin