Philosophia Botanica
was published by the Swedish naturalist and physician Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) who greatly influenced the development of botanical taxonomy and systematics in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Linnaeus's solution was to associate with the generic name an additional single word, what he termed the nomen triviale (which he first introduced in the Philosophia Botanica), to designate a species.
Linnaeus's major achievement was not binomial nomenclature itself, but the separation of the designatory and diagnostic functions of names, the advantage of this being noted in Philosophia Botanica principle §257.
He did this by linking species names to descriptions and the concepts of other botanists as expressed in their literature – all set within a structural framework of carefully drafted rules.
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.
We can never hope for a lasting peace and better times till Botanists come to an agreement among themselves about the fixed laws in accordance with which judgment can be pronounced on names.
[12]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 developed thinking was finally published as Philosophia Botanica[17] ("Science of botany"), released simultaneously in Stockholm and Amsterdam.
Here was a global Flora that codified the usage of morphological terminology, presented a bibliography of all the pre-Linnaean botanical literature of scientific importance, and first applied binomials to the plant kingdom as a whole.
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.
[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 for Philosophia Botanica including exact dates of publication, pagination, editions, facsimiles, brief outline of contents, location of copies, secondary sources, translations, reprints, manuscripts, travelogues, and commentaries are given in Stafleu and Cowan's Taxonomic Literature.
