Species Plantarum

Species Plantarum, two-volume work by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, in which he established a precise and workable two-word, or binomial, system for naming plants. This system forms the basis of modern plant taxonomy. In this masterwork Linnaeus described about 6,000 species of plants and assigned each plant a genus name and a species name, with the genus representing a group of plants and the species designating a specific type of plant within a given genus. Species Plantarum—meaning “species of plants” in Latin—was the first work that consistently applied a referable system of nomenclature; it was a vast improvement over the cumbersome polynomial descriptions generally used before its publication.

Editions

The first edition of Species Plantarum was published in 1753 and contained 1,200 pages of taxonomic descriptions of algae, fungi, and plants. During the 20th century this edition, along with the 1754 edition of Linnaeus’s earlier work, Genera Plantarum, which contains plant genus descriptions, came to be internationally accepted as the starting point in the nomenclature of flowering plants and ferns. In the second edition of Species Plantarum, published in 1762, Linnaeus added descriptions of many more newly discovered species, revised some taxonomies, and rectified minor errors. The second edition, a tome of 1,684 pages, was more popular than the first in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The third edition of the work, published in 1764, introduced no major changes. However, supplementary work published by Linnaeus in 1767 and 1771 and by his son in 1781 augmented the second and third editions. Between 1797 and 1830 a fourth edition of Species Plantarum was published in six volumes. It was compiled by the German botanist Carl Ludwig Willdenow and contained taxonomic descriptions of more than twice the number of plants described in the first edition.

Features and impact

A number of features made Species Plantarum an invaluable taxonomic reference for botanists. In addition to introducing the binomial nomenclature system, Linnaeus followed his brief description of each taxon with bibliographic references to earlier works or citations of specimens that he believed represented the same taxon. These references not only served as acknowledgments or evidence of his sources but also directed readers to earlier, more detailed descriptions of the plants, which compensated for Linnaeus’s short descriptions. The book, therefore, served as an early botanical information retrieval system in addition to being a taxonomic reference.

Discover how ordinary objects work, and expand your understanding of the familiar.

SIGN UP

" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">

Thank you for signing up!"

Back to homepage

By clicking "Sign Up", you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Species Plantarum was organized according to Linnaeus’s sexual system of classification, which relied on counting the male and female reproductive organs of a flower to determine its position within the classification system. This system was adapted by several of Linnaeus’s contemporaries and successors. It also shaped much of the British taxonomic work until the early 19th century. Most importantly, perhaps, the work helped to unify European botanical traditions and to organize botanical knowledge by providing a consistent framework for naming and classifying plants.