---
title: "History of botany"
chunk: 6/10
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_botany"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:59:20.683361+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

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 Prodromus Theatrici Botanici (1620) and Pinax (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 Catalogus Stirpium circa Cantabrigiam Nascentium (1860) which later expanded to his Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britannicarum, essentially the first British Flora. Although his Historia Plantarum (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 Historia Plantarum 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 (1748–1836) extended it yet again to include about 100 orders (present-day families). Frenchman Michel Adanson (1727–1806) in his Familles des Plantes (1763, 1764), apart from extending the current system of family names, emphasized that a natural classification must be based on a consideration of all characters, even though these may later be given different emphasis according to their diagnostic value for the particular plant group. Adanson's method has, in essence, been followed to this day.
18th century plant taxonomy bequeathed to the 19th century a precise binomial nomenclature and botanical terminology, a system of classification based on natural affinities, and a clear idea of the ranks of family, genus and species — although the taxa to be placed within these ranks remains, as always, the subject of taxonomic research.

=== Anatomy ===
 

In the first half of the 18th century, botany was beginning to move beyond descriptive science into experimental science. Although the microscope was invented in 1590, it was only in the late 17th century that lens grinding provided the resolution needed to make major discoveries. Antony van Leeuwenhoek is a notable example of an early lens grinder who achieved remarkable resolution with his single-lens microscopes. Important general biological observations were made by Robert Hooke (1635–1703) but the foundations of plant anatomy were laid by Italian Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) of the University of Bologna in his Anatome Plantarum (1675) and Royal Society Englishman Nehemiah Grew (1628–1711) in his The Anatomy of Plants Begun (1671) and Anatomy of Plants (1682). These botanists explored what is now called developmental anatomy and morphology by carefully observing, describing and drawing the developmental transition from seed to mature plant, recording stem and wood formation. This work included the discovery and naming of parenchyma and stomata.

=== Physiology ===