---
title: "History of botany"
chunk: 10/10
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"
---

Increased experimental precision combined with vastly improved scientific instrumentation was opening up exciting new fields. In 1936, Alexander Oparin (1894–1980) demonstrated a possible mechanism for the synthesis of organic matter from inorganic molecules. In the 1960s, it was determined that the Earth's earliest life-forms treated as plants, the cyanobacteria known as stromatolites, dated back some 3.5 billion years.
Mid-century transmission and scanning electron microscopy presented another level of resolution to the structure of matter, taking anatomy into the new world of "ultrastructure".
New and revised "phylogenetic" classification systems of the plant kingdom were produced by several botanists, including August Eichler. A massive 23 volume Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien was published by Adolf Engler & Karl Prantl over the period 1887 to 1915. Taxonomy based on gross morphology was now being supplemented by using characters revealed by pollen morphology, embryology, anatomy, cytology, serology, macromolecules and more. The introduction of computers facilitated the rapid analysis of large data sets used for numerical taxonomy (also called taximetrics or phenetics). The emphasis on truly natural phylogenies spawned the disciplines of cladistics and phylogenetic systematics. The grand taxonomic synthesis An Integrated System of Classification of Flowering Plants (1981) of American Arthur Cronquist (1919–1992) was superseded when, in 1998, the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group published a phylogeny of flowering plants based on the analysis of DNA sequences using the techniques of the new molecular systematics which was resolving questions concerning the earliest evolutionary branches of the angiosperms (flowering plants). The exact relationship of fungi to plants had for some time been uncertain. Several lines of evidence pointed to fungi being different from plants, animals and bacteria – indeed, more closely related to animals than plants. In the 1980s-90s, molecular analysis revealed an evolutionary divergence of fungi from other organisms about 1 billion years ago – sufficient reason to erect a unique kingdom separate from plants.

=== Biogeography and ecology ===

The publication of Alfred Wegener's (1880–1930) theory of continental drift 1912 gave additional impetus to comparative physiology and the study of biogeography while ecology in the 1930s contributed the important ideas of plant community, succession, community change, and energy flows. From 1940 to 1950, ecology matured to become an independent discipline as Eugene Odum (1913–2002) formulated many of the concepts of ecosystem ecology, emphasising relationships between groups of organisms (especially material and energy relationships) as key factors in the field. Building on the extensive earlier work of Alphonse de Candolle, Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1943) from 1914 to 1940 produced accounts of the geography, centres of origin, and evolutionary history of economic plants.

== See also ==

== References ==

== Bibliography ==