Species Plantarum

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Species Plantarum

Cover page of first edition

Author

Carl Linnaeus

Country

Sweden

Language

Latin

Subject

Botany

Published

Laurentius Salvius (1 May 1753)

Media type

Print

Pages

xi, 1200 + xxxi

OCLC

186272535

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.

Contents
[hide]

1 Publication
2 Importance
3 Contents
4 Notes
5 References
6 External links

Publication[edit]
Species Plantarum[Note 1] was published on 1 May 1753 by Laurentius Salvius in Stockholm, in
two volumes.[1] A second edition was published in 17621763,[1] and a third edition in 1764,
although this "scarcely differed" from the second. [2] 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 (1800) was published in four volumes. [3]

Importance[edit]

Prior to Species Plantarum, this plant was referred to as "Plantago foliis ovato-lanceolatis
pubescentibus, spica cylindrica, scapo tereti"; Linnaeus renamed it Plantago media.
Species Plantarum was the first botanical work to consistently apply the binomial
nomenclature system of naming to any large group of organisms (Linnaeus' tenth edition of
Systema Naturae 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 Plantago foliis
ovato-lanceolatis pubescentibus, spica cylindrica, scapo tereti (meaning "plantain with
pubescent ovate-lanceolate leaves, a cylindrical spike and a terete scape") [4] or Nepeta floribus
interrupte spicatis pedunculatis (meaning "Nepeta with flowers in a stalked, interrupted

spike").[5] In Species Plantarum, 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.[4][5]
The use of binomial names had originally been developed as a kind of shorthand in a student
project about the plants eaten by cattle. [6]
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"[Note 2], respectively) were described as "leguminibus echinata",
"leguminibus glabra" and "leguminibus hirsutis".[8]
Because it is the first work in which binomial nomenclature was consistently applied, Species
Plantarum 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).[4]

Contents[edit]
Species Plantarum 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.[9] In his introduction, Linnaeus estimated that there were only around
10,000 plant species in existence;[10] there are now thought to be around 400,000 species of
flowering plants alone.[11]
The species were arranged in around a thousand genera, which were grouped into 24 classes,
according to Linnaeus' sexual system of classification.[12] There are no descriptions of the
genera in Species Plantarum; these are supplied in the companion volume Genera Plantarum
("the genera of plants"), the fifth edition of which was printed at a similar time to the first
edition of Species Plantarum.[8] Linnaeus' sexual system is now acknowledged to be an
artificial system, rather than one which accurately reflects shared ancestry,[12] 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.[1]