Philosophia Botanica - Historical Context of Linnaean Publications

Historical Context of Linnaean Publications

Systema Naturæ was Linnaeus’s early attempt to organise nature. The first edition was published in 1735 and in it he outlines his ideas for the hierarchical classification of the natural world (the “system of nature”) by dividing it into the animal kingdom (Regnum animale), the plant kingdom (Regnum vegetabile) and the "mineral kingdom" (Regnum lapideum) each of which he further divided into classes, orders, genera and species, with characters, differences, synonyms, and places of occurrence. The tenth edition of this book in 1758 has been adopted as the starting point for zoological nomenclature. The first edition of 1735 was just eleven pages long, but this expanded with further editions until the final thirteenth edition of 1767 had reached over 3000 pages.

In the early eighteenth century colonial expansion and exploration created a demand for the description of thousands of new organisms. This highlighted difficulties in communication about plants, the replication of descriptions, and the importance of an agreed way of presenting, publishing and applying plant names. From about 1730 when Linnaeus was in his early twenties and still in Uppsala, Sweden, he planned a listing all the genera and species of plants known to western science in his day. Before this could be achieved he needed to establish the principles of classification and nomenclature on which these works were to be based.