Carl Linnaeus has a lot to answer for. As a young medical student he became obsessed with botany, then a necessity as most medicines were derived from plants. At the time the naming of plants was a rather haphazard affair, some names were given to multiple plants, others could be many words long. It all made for great confusion and difficulty disseminating information. In an attempt to manage the situation, in 1735 he published the first edition of his masterpiece of classification, the Systema Naturae. Most people remember this book as being the first time that plants were classified according to the now familiar Kingdom, Class, Order, Genus and Species (family was a later addition). What they sometimes forget is that it was also the first time that plants, and later animals, were given a standardised binomial designation. This was a revolutionary idea and quickly came to dominate the literature and is still in place almost 300 years later. Continue reading “A Rose by Any Other Name”
A Rose by Any Other Name
