The book was the principal work of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, a French botanist credited with establishing the modern concept of the genus.

[2] The main portion of the book contains an exhaustive list of plant names, organized in a system of "classes", "sections", "genera", and "species".

[note 2] Rather than being translated from the original French work, Botanical institutions was adapted from the Latin Institutiones rei herbariae.

The edition included a direct translation of the original, additional commentary from English contributors, two alphabetical indices, and a brief biography on Tournefort.

[6] Where Tournefort argued that the "essence of the plant" could be tied to specific and generic names, botanists like Georges-Louis Leclerc and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck did not believe an organized science should be burdened by arbitrary nominal distinctions.