Critica Botanica

Critica Botanica ("Critique of botany", Leiden, July 1737) was written by Swedish botanist, physician, zoologist and naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778).

Seu Fundamentorum botanicorum pars IV Accedit Johannis Browallii De necessitate historiae naturalis discursus.

In the Critica, Linnaeus presented a series of rules which guided him in his own publications, established standards of procedure for his followers, and led him to discard on a grand scale the names used by his predecessors.

Linnaeus's solution was to associate with the generic name an additional single word, what he termed the nomen triviale, to designate a species.

From about 1730 when Linnaeus was in his early twenties and still in Uppsala, Sweden, he planned a listing of all the genera and species of plants known to western science in his day.

[11]From 1735 to 1738 Linnaeus worked in the Netherlands where he was personal physician to George Clifford (1685–1760) a wealthy Anglo-Dutch merchant–banker with the Dutch East India Company who had an impressive garden containing four large glasshouses that were filled with tropical and sub-tropical plants collected overseas.

The ideas he explored in these works were revised until, in 1751, his mature thinking was finally published as Philosophia Botanica[16] ("Science of botany") released simultaneously in Stockholm and Amsterdam.

It presented his new 'sexual system' of plant classification and became the starting point for scientific botanical nomenclature for 6000 of the 10,000 species he estimated made up the world's flora.

Critica Botanica which was published a year later in July 1737, the principles of the Fundamenta are repeated essentially unchanged but with extensive additions in smaller print.

[3] In the Philosophia Botanica § 159 Linnaeus had stated that a genus of plants was a group of species possessing similarly constructed organs of fructification, i.e. flowers and fruits, and hence distinguishable by these from other genera.

[25] Some examples of the aphorisms (principles) concerned with genera are given below: Linnaeus considered that generic names should be apt in meaning, pleasant to hear, easy to say, and not more than 12 letters long.

[29] Botanical historian Alan Morton, though praising Linnaeus's contribution to classification and nomenclature, is less complimentary about the theoretical ideas expressed in the publications discussed above: Linnaeus was the master of the botany of his time, and his influence on the development of botanical science powerful and lasting ... his work demonstrated the success of his improved methods of description, diagnosis and nomenclature, and made detailed systematic observation the guide and criterion in taxonomy.

In his theoretical ideas, on the contrary, Linnaeus was a man of the past who never escaped from the restricting circle of idealist-essentialist thought in which his early high school training had confined him.

This was the background to the contradictory statements in the Philosophia, to his narrow view of botany, his blindness to the advances in plant physiology and anatomy, [and] his unquestioning acceptance of special creation.

Even so, the direct results of his work were salutary: descriptions were standardised, ranks fixed, names given according to precise rules and a classification proposed which permitted rapid and efficient storage and retrieval of taxonomic information.

[34]Full bibliographic details including exact dates of publication, pagination, editions, facsimiles, brief outline of contents, location of copies, secondary sources, translations, reprints, travelogues, and commentaries are given in Stafleu and Cowan's Taxonomic Literature.