DEFINITIONS: Systematic botany deals with the identification and naming of plants and with their arrangement into

groups of closely related organisms, such as genera or families. It includes all activities that are part of the effort to organize and record diversity of plants. OBJECTIVES: Plant taxonomy has four objectives: 1. 2. 3. 4. To inventory the worlds flora To provide a method for identification and communication To produce a coherent and universal system of classification; and To demonstrate the evolutionary implications of plant diversity.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF CLASSIFICATION: I. Preliterate folk taxonomies (ethnobiology)

Preliterate people arranged plants by their usefulness, whether edible, poisonous, or medicinal. Some of these peoples regularly use plants for fish or arrow poisons, others for drugs to treat wounds or sickness, and still others for narcotic or hallucinatory purposes. II. Early Western Civilizations

Developed in areas such as Babylonia and Egypt, where cultivation of crops was feasible. Since agriculture supported these civilizations, botanical lore was of great importance. 1. Theophrastus (370 285 B.C.) Father of Botany Important works: Enquiry into Plants, The Causes of Plants He classified plants into herbs, under shrubs, shrubs, and trees. He described 500 different species of plants He noted many differences in plants, such as corolla types, ovary positions, and inflorescences. He distinguished between flowering and non-flowering plants

2. Calius Plinius Secundus, Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23 79) Roman naturalist and writer Important work: Historia Naturalis (Natural History), a 37-volume encyclopedia wherein nine of the volumes were devoted to medicinal plants.

3. Pedanios Dioscorides (first century A.D.) Roman military surgeon Has firsthand knowledge of plants used as remedies. Important work: Materia medica, which included descriptions and excellent illustrations of some 600 species of medicinal plants. Materia medica contained less botany than the works of Theophrastus, but its usefulness in medicine caused it to be considered the definitive work of plant knowledge until the end of the Middle Ages.

III.

The Middle Ages

During the European Middle Ages, little progress was made in original scientific study of plants. Wars and decay of the Roman Empire caused the destruction of much literature. Manuscripts were lost at a faster rate than they could be laboriously copied in the newly founded monasteries. 1. Islamic Botany (A.D. 610 1100) Some classical botanical works were preserved by the Moslem society because the Islamic scholars had a great admiration for Aristotle and other Greek scholars. Since their scientific interests were of a practical nature, pharmacy and medicine of the Islamic people were highly developed. Islamic botanists produced practical lists of drug plants, but developed no original schemes of classification.

2. Albertus Magnus, Doctor Universalis (1193 1280) Important work: De vegetabilis which consist of excellent descriptions of medicinal plants. He attempted a classification of plants and is believed to have been the first to recognize, on the basis of stem structure, the difference between monocots and dicots.

IV.

Herbalists

With the coming of the Renaissance, there was a revival of scientific spirit, and interest in botany increased. The invention of printing with movable type in about 1440 allowed botanical books to be produced which were available to a wider audience than the former hand-copied manuscripts. Botanical books were produced with descriptions and illustrations made from woodblocks or metal plate engravings. They were intended to be used for identifying medicinal plants. These books, or herbals, were in turn sought and used by gatherers and diggers of medicinals, who were called physicians or herbalists. The herbals were written for

utilitarian purposes; they were often cheaply done and a poor intellectual quality, sometimes containing independent observations but generally little that might be considered real scientific advancements. Often published locally, the herbals were entitled Gart der Gesundheit or Hortus sanitatis. 1. Otto Brunfels Important work: Herbarium vivae eicones contains excellent illustrations. Earliest German Renaissance writer of note on botany.

2. Jerome Bock Important work: Neu Kreuterbuck contained excellent descriptions and some beginnings toward a system of classification.

3. Valerius Cordus Important work: Historia Plantarum contains descriptions of 446 species in flower and fruit. He prepared botanical descriptions in a systematic format based on studies of living plants.

4. Leonhard Fuchs Important work: De Historia stirpium contains elaborate descriptions and illustrations and was better-documented and most noteworthy of the herbals of that period.

5. Aztecs of Mexico They developed botanical gardens, cultivated plants for both food and as ornamentals, and used medicinal herbs. The Badianus Manuscript, an Aztec herbal, was published in 1552 by two Aztecs.

6. Chinese civilization This civilization is older and much more advanced during the Middle Ages than civilization in Wetern Europe. The Chinese were printing on paper with movable block type before A.D. 1000. They were very interested in plants and introduced many species into cultivation. Botanical works were produced in China around 3600 B.C.

7. India Agriculture was developed in this country nearly 2000 B.C., and many different crops were cultivated. One interesting Indian botanical work, thought to have been written around the first century, indicates that methods of cultivation were well known.

V.

17th Century Botanists

The aggressive exploration of the New World in the 1600s was responsible for many new plant discoveries. In Europe, the herbalists studied these plants and added them to their herbals. Because of the large number of new species, botanists needed to develop a more precise system for naming and arranging plants. 1. Andrea Caesalpino (1519 1603) Italian botanist Important work: De plantis libri (1583) contains descriptions and classification based on the features of plants rather than its uses.

2. Caspar Bauhin (1560 1624) Swiss botanist Important work: Pinax theatri botanici contains a list of 6000 plants. It provided a much-needed synonymy of plant names by listing for each plant all the names given to it by different botanists. He was the first to use binomial nomenclature and have an understanding of a concept of grouping species into genera. The genera were not described but were defined by the characters of the included species.

3. John Ray (1627 1705) English biologist Important works: Methodus plantarum nova and Historia plantarum The last edition of Methodus (1703) treated 18,000 species. He developed a method of classification based upon form relationships by grouping together plants which resembled one another. He attempted to define species in the terms of morphology and reproduction

4. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656 1708) French botanist Important work: Institutiones rei herbariae (1700) was popular because of the ease in identifying its 9000 species arranged into 700 genera.

His system of classification was inferior because it was artificial. Its purpose was not to group closely related species but to aid in identification. He placed great emphasis on the genus thus considered as the Father of the genus concept.

VI.

LINNAEN PERIOD

Carolus Linnaeus (1707 1778) Swedish medical doctor and botanist Father of Taxonomy Consistently use the binomial system of classification Important works: Systema naturae (1735) presents Linnaeus system of classification in outline form. Genera plantarum (1737) provided descriptions of many genera, and Species plantarum (1753) is a twovolume catalog used for plant identification. He divided plants into 24 classes based in large part on the number, union and length of stamens. Plants with one stamen were placed in Class Monandria, with two stamens Class Diandra, and then Triandria, Tetrandria, Pentandria, and so on. Classes were divided into orders based on the number of styles in each flower.

VII.

NATURAL SYSTEMS OF CLASSIFICATION

By the end of the 1700s, most botanists realized that there were natural affinities among plants. Opposition developed to the artificial sexual classification scheme of Linnaeus, because his system often placed unlike plants together (e.g. cacti and cherries). This opposition was especially strong in France, where the sexual system had never been fully accepted. There was gradual abandonment of: a. the use of single characters to classify plants b. the selection of characters based on theory rather than experience or experimentation A natural system of classification implies that plants presumed to be relates are cataloged together. In its original context, the natural system was designed to reflect Gods plan of creation and not one of lineages. 1. Michel Adanson (1727 1806) French naturalist His classification system was based on the idea of giving all observable characters equal weight. Important work: Familles des plantes

Adansonian methods have found advocates in recent years in numerical taxonomists who use computers to develop classifications from all measurable features of plants.

2. J.B.P. de Lamarck (1744 1829) French biologist Important work: Flore francaise (1778) contains Lamarcks procedures for determining which plant precedes another in a natural series, and made rules for the grouping of species and the treatment of orders and families.

3. de Jussieu Family a. Antoine de Jussieu (1688 1758) director of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. b. Joseph de Jussieu (1704 1779) explorer and collector in South America. c. Bernard de Jussieu (1699 1777) founder of the Royal Botanical Garden at Versailles. d. Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu (1748 1836) founder in 1793 of the Musee dHistoire Naturelle de Paris. Important work: Genera plantarum secundum ordines naturalis disposita He recognized 100 carefully characterized groups of plants that are now called families (he called them orders) Their system of classification was superior to the artificial sexual system of Linnaeus and was fundamental to further progress toward a natural system of classification. 4. de Candolle Family a. Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778 1841) published Theorie elementaire de la botanique, which set forth the principles of plant taxonomy. His system of classification differ somewhat from the de Jussieu system, but it was a natural classification scheme. His major effort was Prodromus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis which was an attempt to classify and describe every known species of vascular plant. This book was never completed but nevertheless it remains the only worldwide treatment of certain groups.

b. Alphonse de Candolle edited the last volumes of Prodomus. 5. George Bentham (1800 1884) and Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817 -1911)

Important work: Genera plantarum (1862 1883) Bentham was a self-trained English botanist and Hooker was director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew near London. Genera plantarum is a three-volume work in Latin, giving names and descriptions of all genera of seed plants. The classification system by which it is arranged is clearly derived from the systems of de Jussieu and de Candolle. It was one of the last great works where the species concepts were based on the idea that species are fixed entities, unchanged through time and placed on earth by the Creator. Their system of classification was accepted and used in the British colonial floras and elsewhere.

VIII.

EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND PHYLOGENETIC SYSTEMS

1. August Wilhelm Eichler (1839 1887) German plant morphologist Developed in 1883 what was to become a widely accepted classification of the plant kingdom. He divided the plant kingdom into the nonseed plants (the Cryptogamae) and the seed plants (the Phanerogamae). The former group contains algae, fungi, bryophytes, and seedless vascular plants, whereas the latter is divided into gymnosperms and angiosperms. Angiosperms are further separated into monocotyledons and dicotyledons.

2. Adolf Engler (1844 1930) and Karl Prantl (1849 1893) Professor of Botany at the University of Berlin and Director of the Berlin Botanical Garden from 1889 1921. He proposed a system of classification based on that of Eichler. Important work: Die naturlichen Pflanzenfamilien in many volumes from 1887 1915. This monumental work includes keys and descriptions from all the plant families. It is abundantly summarized, illustrated and the morphological, anatomical and geographical literature are summarized.

3. Charles E. Bessey (1845 1915) Professor of the University of Nebraska First American to make a major contribution to the theory of plant classification In 1894 he published an intentionally phylogenetic taxonomic system based upon the principles of organic evolution. He considered the flowering plants to be monophyletic, i.e. derived from one evolutionary line and representing a continuum of lineages.

His system was based on a set of dicta or concepts of primitive features found in ancient plants, versus advanced characters of more recently evolved plants.

4. John Hutchinson (1884 1972) British botanist Important works: Families of Flowering Plants (1973) and Genera of Flowering Plants (1964 1967) in which he proposed a system of classification resembling Besseys but differing in several fundamental points. He derived the flowering plants from hypothetical proangiosperms (i.e. the transitional plants from gymnosperms to angiosperms) and divided them into 3 lines: the Monocotyledones, Dictotyledones, and Lignosae Dicotyledones. He considered the woody versus herbaceous habit of fundamental importance among the dicotyledons. The woody line was derived from the woody Magnoliales and the herbaceous line from the herbaceous Ranales.

IX.

CONTEMPORARY CLASSIFICATIONS

1. Robert F. Thorne (1920 to present) Important work: A Phylogenetic Classification of the Angiospermae.

2. Armen Takhtajan (1910 to present) Important work: Flowering Plants: Origin and Dispersal was an influencial early work. A revision of this classification appeared in 1997: Diversity and Classification of Flowering Plants.

3. Rolf Dahlgren (1932 to 1985) at the University of Copenhagen. Important work: A Revised System of Classification of the Angiosperms.

4. Arthur Cronquist (1919 to 1991) Worked most of his life at the New York Botanical Garden. Many of his ideas are Besseyan with some influence from Takhtajan. His most famous work: An Integrated System of Classification of Flowering Plants (1981) and the revision (1988) -- much adopted system today.