BOTANY

BOTANY. From antiquity into the late eighteenth century, the medical utility of plants provided the primary motive for studying them. However, from the late fifteenth century on, other reasons for the investigation of plants became increasingly important and gave botany a disciplinary and professional identity distinct from medicine. These included: explicating classical texts; portraying plants accurately in works of art; collecting rarities for natural history cabinets, gardens, and museums; exploiting natural resources; glorifying the wonders of creation; and satisfying the curiosity of natural philosophers. The primary thrust of botany in early modern Europe was plant identification, description, and classification, an effort that culminated in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when systematics assimilated morphology, reproduction, anatomy, and geography.

LATE FIFTEENTH CENTURY TO MID-SIXTEENTH CENTURY

While editing the ancient authorities on medicinal plants—Pliny's Natural History and Dioscorides' De Materia medica (On the materials of medicine)—in the late fifteenth century, Italian humanists looked at living plants to resolve textual problems. In contrast to medieval doctors' dependence on illiterate herb-gatherers, medical humanists in the early sixteenth century strove to emulate Dioscorides' and Galen's firsthand experience with medicinal plants.

The lack of a shared vocabulary for plant description and nomenclature was circumvented by the addition of accurate, detailed, naturalistic woodcut illustrations to printed herbals—a key innovation introduced by Otto Brunfels's (1488–1534) Herbarum Vivae Eicones (Living images of plants, 1530) and Leonhard Fuchs's (1501–1534) Historia Stirpium (Notable commentaries on the history of plants, 1542), and imitated by virtually every herbal thereafter. The failure of Leonardo da Vinci's (1452–1519) superb drawings and observations of plant forms—unfinished at his death in 1519—to influence early modern botany underscores the scientific consequences of coupling the technology of printing to skill in depicting plants.

Beginning in the 1530s, medical schools at Padua, Pisa, Basel, and Montpellier established chairs of botany, required lectures, demonstrations, and field trips, and built botanical gardens. Students of Luca Ghini (1500–1556), professor of botany at Bologna and Pisa, spread his technique of preserving pressed, dried specimens throughout Europe.

MID-SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The humanist physicians' desire to prescribe the precise plants named by classical authorities spurred Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–1578), a Habsburg court physician, to prepare a voluminous illustrated commentary on Dioscorides (first edition, 1544), the best-selling herbal of the period. Its revisions and enlargements helped Renaissance botanists realize that they knew far more plants than their ancient counterparts.

The immense "universal" herbals of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century—published or projected by major botanists from most European countries, including William Turner (c. 1508–1568), Conrad Gessner (1516–1565), Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), Jacques Dalechamps (D'Aléchamps, Dalechampius, 1513–1588), Charles de L'Escluse (Clusius, 1526–1609), Matthias de L'Obel (Lobelius, 1538–1616), Rembert Dodoens (Dodonaeus, 1517–1585), Jean Bauhin (1541–1612), Caspar Bauhin (1560–1624), and John Gerard (1564–1637)—represented efforts to describe both long-familiar plants and the flood of new species. Plants entered European gardens and herbaria through the voyages of discovery and conquest and by exploration of local habitats. Informal networks of professional and amateur enthusiasts surmounted religious and political divisions and fostered a rapid international exchange of specimens, books, pictures, and observations.

To organize their entries, most herbals used a pragmatic mixture of systems, grouping some plants by their uses, others by similarities of form or habitats. Some herbals, emblem books, and books on natural magic—reflecting astrology, Paracelsan chemistry, and the search for symbolic significance in nature—stressed plants' hidden, inner properties, manifested by distinctive external "signatures." Appealing to Aristotle and Theophrastus's philosophical emphasis on growth and reproduction as the essential characteristics of the vegetative soul, Andrea Cesalpino (Caesalpinus, 1524–1603) stressed resemblances of seeds and fruits in grouping plants in his influential De Plantis Libri XVI (On plants, 1583).

EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Caspar Bauhin (1560–1624), professor of botany and anatomy at Basel, took the first critical step toward a single botanical lexicon of plant names: his Pinax Theatri Botanici (Pinax, i.e., Index, for the botanical realm, 1623) summarized the synonyms and literature for some six thousand plants—ten times the number in Dioscorides—and assigned them brief descriptive Latin names that emphasized their affinities. (Pinax remains an indispensable guide to identifying plants in earlier works.) An equally important step came from Joachim Jung's (1587–1657) astute analysis of plant parts, which reached John Ray (1627–1705)—English cleric, naturalist, natural philosopher, and fellow of the Royal Society—by 1660 in manuscript. Between 1660 and 1704, Ray linked taxonomy, nomenclature, morphology, and bibliography in a series of strictly botanical books that brought together first-hand accounts of many previously undescribed plants, new technical terminology (such as petal, calyx, cotyledon), close observations of growth and form, and deep reflection on method.

Ray spelled out the combinations of essential morphological features that defined natural classes of plants. While acknowledging natural groupings at least at the genus/species level (categories that went back to Aristotle), the French botanist, J. P. de Tournefort (1656–1708), countered with a convenient and widely adopted artificial system of classification based primarily on the disposition of flower parts.

The chemical composition of plants and the form and function of plant parts, previously regarded as unimportant, came under the scrutiny of botanists trained in iatrochemistry—notably Guy de la Brosse (1586–1641), the founder of the Paris Jardin des Plantes in 1640—and in microscopy. Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) in England and Marcello Malphighi (1628–1694) in Italy reported to the Royal Society in the late seventeenth century on their experimental investigations of plant cells and tissue structures. Stephen Hales (1677–1761) in the 1720s and Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) and Jan Ingen-Housz (1730–1799) half a century later devised chemical and physical experiments to measure plant nutrition and metabolism.

The demonstration of sexual reproduction in flowering plants—in an obscure 1694 publication, De Sexu Plantarum Epistola (On the sex of plants), by Rudolf Jacob Camerer (Camerarius), professor of medicine at Tübingen—both resolved a longstanding question and provided the brilliant Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) with the basis of a taxonomic system that overrode all earlier proposals.

Believing that God had created species and genera, Linnaeus embedded their essential characters in his binomial nomenclature—henceforth giving the terms "genus" and "species" distinctive scientific meanings. Although Linnaeus clearly recognized larger natural groupings (plant families were methodically elucidated by the French botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu [1748–1836] and Michel Adanson [1727–1806] in the late eighteenth century), his Species Plantarum (Species of plants, 1753) constructed a deliberately artificial system of classification, easily understood by anyone—even "ladies"—who could count the sexual parts of flowers. By imposing a common language and rational organization on the plant kingdom, Linnaeus made botany both a symbol of divine order and the epitome of Enlightenment science.

See also Aldrovandi, Ulisse ; Biology ; Boerhaave, Herman ; Enlightenment ; Gardens and Parks ; Gessner, Conrad ; Hooke, Robert ; Leonardo da Vinci ; Linnaeus, Carl ; Malpighi, Marcello ; Medicine ; Museums ; Natural History ; Natural Philosophy ; Nature ; Paracelsus ; Priestley, Joseph ; Ray, John ; Scientific Illustration ; Scientific Method.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Bauhinus, Casparus. Pinax Theatri Botanici. Basel, 1623.

Brunfelsius, Otho. Herbarum Vivae Eicones. Strasbourg, 1530.

Camerarius, Rudolphus Jacobus. De Sexu Plantarum Epistola. Tübingen, 1694.

Caesalpinus, Andreas. De Plantis Libri XVI. Florence, 1583.

Linnaeus, Carl. Species Plantarum. London, 1957–1959. A facsimile of the first edition, 1753.

Meyer, Frederick G., Emily Emmart Trueblood, and John L. Heller. The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs: Vol. 1, Commentary; Vol. 2, De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes, 1542: Facsimile. Stanford, 1999.

Secondary Sources

Arber, Agnes. Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470–1670. 3rd ed. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1986. Facsimile reprint of second edition (1938), with an introduction and annotations by William T. Stearn.

Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley, 1994.

Koerner, Lisbet. Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.

Morton, A. G. History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day. London and New York, 1981.

Reeds, Karen Meier. Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities. New York, 1991.

Karen Reeds

BOTANY

BOTANY. The history of botany in America has several themes: the identification and study of new species discovered in the New World; the transformation of the field away from classification based on morphology, or shape, and toward interest in physiology and, later, genetics; the concomitant specialization and professionalization of botany, a subject that was originally relatively open to amateur practitioners, including women; and the development of American botanical research to rival the initially dominant European centers in England, France, and Germany. The European Renaissance had seen a revival of interest in botany and in ancient botanical works that was aided by the invention of the printing press in 1453, which allowed for a uniformity of plant depictions that hand-drawn manuscripts could not ensure.

Discoveries in the New World

The exploration of the New World, beginning with Columbus's voyage of 1492, was marked by the discovery of new flora and fauna, enthusiastically documented and described by travelers. It was not uncommon for those who wrote about the Americas to describe the plants and animals they had seen in terms of familiar European species, and, indeed, sometimes to mistakenly identify American species as being the same as European species. However, since plants do not move—unlike animals that might offer colonial settlers and travelers only a glimpse before disappearing—many American plants were quickly identified to be distinct from similar species in the Old World. Although Native Americans had developed their own classifications of North American flora, and although Native Americans were often a source of knowledge for colonists learning about the uses of new plants, Europeans tended to impose their own classifications onto the plants of the New World.

At the time, the discovery of new species posed a theological problem for European Christians, as the description of Noah's Ark insisted that Noah had gathered every kind of plant, while the New World contained many plants not part of the European and Asian ecosystems. Questions quickly arose as to whether there had once been a land bridge between the Americas and Eurasia and, even prior to Darwin, whether American plant species were modified variations on European species.

Moreover, some plants from the Americas became quite profitable crops for Europeans, most notably tobacco and chocolate, and many Europeans came over to explore and study the new plants. The first notable publication on the flora of the Americas was by Nicolás Monardes, who never traveled to the New World but wrote on its plants in his 1574 Historia Medicinal, which was translated into English by John Frampton as Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde (1577). The work was primarily concerned with the medicinal benefits of the plants and herbs in the Americas, and, indeed, many of the practitioners of botany in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and even into the nineteenth centuries were also trained in medicine and were interested in the possible new cures available in undocumented American plants.

However, amateurs also made important contributions to the study of American botanicals, examining the plants in local areas, presenting their findings at botanical societies, swapping samples with other botanists and sending plants back to Europe, and cultivating herbaria and arboreta. From colonial times until the mid-nineteenth century, the work of amateurs in finding, studying, and documenting new species was important to the study of botany as a whole. A primary example is Jane Colden (1724–1766), the daughter of the botanist Cadwallader Colden. Tutored only by her father, Jane Colden studied and drew the plants of New York, classifying hundreds of plants, including the gardenia, which she discovered.

Jane Colden was especially renowned for understanding and using the Linnaean classification scheme. Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), a Swedish doctor and botanist, developed his hierarchy throughout his life, his most notable publications including the Systema Naturae (1735), GeneraPlantarum (1737), and Species Plantarum (1753). The Linnaean system, which has since been greatly revised, divided animals and plants into kingdoms, classes, orders, genera, and species, all written in Latin. Each species was given a two-part (binomial) name of genus and species.

Classification

Linnaeus's classification system greatly influenced eighteenth-century botany in America. Some of his students came over to categorize the species of the New World, most significantly Pehr Kalm, who traveled through the Great Lakes, the Mid-Atlantic colonies, and Canada, bringing back samples. Meanwhile, colonial settlers like John Bartram (1699–1777), Cadwallader Colden (1688–1776), Humphry Marshall (1722–1801), and others worked to incorporate the local flora into the work of Linnaeus, which provided a new sense of order for those working on studying the plants and animals of the overwhelmingly diverse and novel New World.

But although the Linnaean system was helpful, it could not survive the strain of the thousands of new discoveries in the Americas and Asia. Plant classifications based on reproduction resulted in categories that contained obviously widely diverging plants. In particular, Linnaeus was challenged by French botanists who emphasized grouping plants by shape (morphology). Antoine Laurent de Jussieu's (1748–1836) 1789 Genera Plantarum prompted the reorganizing of classification by appearance and added levels to the taxonomy.

The Jussieu modifications quickly, but not uncontroversially, became added to botanical literature, although the Linnaean system continued to be used in many prominent American publications through the early nineteenth century. Meanwhile, French botanists made other contributions to the study of North American plants. André Michaux (1746–1802) and his son, François André (1770–1855), traveled through much of eastern North America, from Canada to the Bahamas, observing and collecting. The end result of their massive researches was the 1803 Flora Boreali-Americana, the first large-scale compilation of North American plants. The work of the Michaux drew, not uncritically, on the reforms of Jussieu.

Nineteenth-Century American Botanists

The Michaux volumes encouraged revisions, the first coming in 1814 with the Flora Americae Septentrionalis of Frederick Pursh (1774–1820), which incorporated findings from the Lewis and Clark Expedition and thus contained information about western America. Pursh's contemporary, Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859), was born and died in England, but his interest, education, and work in botany were conducted primarily in America, where he explored the south and west, collecting and publishing his findings. Although he is known for his extensive discoveries, Nuttall also wrote the 1818 Genera of the North American Plants and 1827 Introduction to Systematic and Physiological Botany. His work is symbolic of a turn from European-dominated study of North American plants toward American specialists in native species. Although Americans had always played important roles in the discovery, cataloging, and study of local plants, the early and mid-nineteenth century saw the burgeoning of work by American botanists, both amateur and professional. Meanwhile, the American government sponsored expeditions to find and collect plant species in the less studied areas of the south and west of America.

Among the American botanists of the early nineteenth century, the most famous are Jacob Bigelow (1786–1879), Amos Eaton (1776–1842), John Torrey (1796–1873), and Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859). Bigelow, who was trained as a doctor, was primarily interested in the medicinal uses of plants, but he also surveyed the flora of Boston for his Florula Bostoniensis (1814). Additionally, he did work in physiology, which was already a topic of considerable interest in the first decades of the century and would come to dominate morphology in botanical concerns by the end of the nineteenth century.

Amos Eaton gained his reputation primarily through his Manual of Botany (first published in 1817, but revised and enlarged through many editions), which became the basic botanical teaching text of the first half of the nineteenth century. Eaton, who also worked in geology and chemistry, encouraged the participation of women in science, although indeed women were already quite well represented in botany, which he noted. In part this botanical activity by women was due to the fact that contemporary botany required little laboratory equipment: discoveries could be made by anyone who was diligent and well read in botany, and so graduate degrees or access to laboratories—both largely denied at the time to women—were unnecessary to botanical work. However, although Eaton emphasized field work, the most accessible kind of botanical study, he was also part of a trend toward including laboratory experiments.

Eaton's teaching and text were very influential, perhaps most importantly in botany upon John Torrey, whom Eaton met while serving a prison sentence for forgery—a charge he denied. Torrey was the son of a man who worked for the State Prison of New York, and Eaton gave the young Torrey lessons in a variety of scientific subjects, including botany. While Torrey went on to have a career that included work in medicine, geology, mineralogy, and chemistry, he is primarily remembered for his botanical work, cataloging New York flora, collaborating with Asa Gray, creating a renowned herbarium, promoting government-financed expeditions, utilizing—albeit inconsistently—the classification work of John Lindley, and serving as the first president of the Torrey Botanical Society, a group of prominent amateur and professional botanists in New York. The Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Society, which began publication in 1870, is the oldest American botanical journal.

Although Bigelow, Eaton, Torrey, Nuttall, and others did much to encourage and expand knowledge of native plants, it is Asa Gray (1810–1888) who takes center stage in the history of American botany in the nineteenth century. Gray published A Flora of North America (1838–1843) with Torrey, which drew on the Lindley classification system, which was a development from Jussieu's "natural system." Gray's textbooks replaced those of Eaton, and the botanical research center he set up at Harvard cultivated many of the next generation of botanists and encouraged work in anatomy, cellular structure, and physiology, realms that were dominated by German botanists. Interested in East Asian flora as well as that of North America, Gray quickly supported Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory as expounded in the 1859 Origin of Species because he had noticed regional variation himself. This drew him into conflict with another Harvard professor, the zoologist Louis Agassiz, who was a prominent anti-Darwinian. However, evolution soon became a guiding principle in botanical study.

Theoretical Research

The twentieth century saw the rise of American research devoted to the theoretical aspects of botany, areas in which America had typically lagged behind Europe, as American botanists became more involved in experiments, physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics, and less involved in the discovery of new species. While Darwin could not provide an explanation for the origins of variation and the inheritance of characteristics, Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), a Moravian monk, offered hereditary principles based on experiments with pea plants in his Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden (Experiments in plant hybridization; 1865, 1869). Although Mendel's research went unacknowledged until 1900, when rediscovered it was profoundly influential in turning the research edge of botany, which was already moving from morphology to physiology, toward genetics as well. In addition, during the first half of the twentieth century, ecological research, which tied together the plants and animals of a habitat, began to thrive, as evidenced by the work of Henry Chandler Cowles (1869–1939) and others. Mathematics was put to use in the study of plant and animal populations, and in 1942 Raymond Lindeman (1915–1942) demonstrated the "trophic-dynamic aspect" of ecology to show how energy moves from individual to individual through a local environment.

Since the 1960s, plant physiology has looked more to understanding the relationship between plants and their surrounding environment: studying plant reactions to environmental change, both with a look to the evolutionary mechanisms involved and concerning the ongoing degradation of the global environment.

Moreover, the introduction of genetic research has prompted yet another change in taxonomy, with the rise of phylogenetics, in which variation is traced to the genetic level, allowing botanists to reorganize classification by evolutionary relatedness, replacing previous categories. Relatedly, work on population genetics, genetic engineering, and genomics (the study of all of the genes in a DNA sequence) has blossomed since the 1960s, a no-table recent achievement being the completion of the Arabadopsis thaliana genome—the first plant genome completely sequenced—in 2000. Although some of the work was completed by American researchers and partly funded by the American government, the project represents the prominent international collaborations that are shaping botany today, with aid also provided by the European Union and the Japanese government and research carried out in America, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Evans, Howard Ensign. Pioneer Naturalists: The Discovery and Naming of North American Plants and Animals. New York: Henry Holt, 1993.

Greene, Edward Lee. Landmarks of Botanical History. Edited by Frank N. Egerton. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983.

Humphrey, Harry Baker. Makers of North American Botany. New York: Ronald Press, 1961.

Keeney, Elizabeth B. The Botanizers: Amateur Scientists in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Mauseth, James D. Botany: An Introduction to Plant Biology. 2d ed. Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1998.

Morton, A. G. History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day. New York: Academic Press, 1981.

Reveal, James L. Gentle Conquest: The Botanical Discovery of North America with Illustrations from the Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.: Starwood, 1992.

Stuckey, Ronald L., ed. Development of Botany in Selected Regions of North America before 1900. New York: Arno Press, 1978.

Caroline R.Sherman

See alsoBotanical Gardens .

54. Botany

See also 44. BIOLOGY ; 167. FLOWERS ; 188. GRASSES ; 241. LEAVES ; 319. PLANTS ; 401. TREES .

agrostology

the branch of systematic botany that studies grasses. Also called graminology. —agrostologist , n. —agrostologic , agrostological , adj.

algology

the branch of botany that studies seaweeds and algae. Also called phycology . —algologist , n. —algological , adj.

ampelography

the branch of botany that studies the cultivation of grapes. —ampelographer , n.

anamorphosis

an abnormal change in the form of a plant that falsely gives it the appearance of a different species. —anamorphic , adj.

anisotropy

the state or condition of certain flowers or plants of having different dimensions along different axes. See also 316. PHYSICS . —anisotropic , adj.

batology

the branch of botany that studies brambles. —batologist , n.

bisymmetry

in botany, the condition of having two planes of symmetry at right angles to one another. —bisymmetric , bisymmetrical , adj.

botany

a major division of biology that studies all plant life. Also called phytology. —botanist, n. —botanical, adj.

bryology

the branch of botany that studies mosses and liverworts. —bryologist, n.

caprification

the pollination process of figs, in which fig wasps, attracted by the caprifigs, or inedible fig-fruit, pollinate the figs. —caprificator, n.

caricologist

a person who specializes in the study of sedges.

carpology

the branch of botany that studies the structure of fruits and seeds. —carpologist, n. —carpological, adj.

chromatism

abnormal coloration in parts of a plant that are usually green. See also 92. COLOR .

cryptogamist

one proficient in cryptogamic botany, i.e., the study of plants, as ferns and mosses, that have no true flowers or seeds.

dendrology

the branch of botany that studies trees. —dendrologist, n. —dendrologic, dendrological, adj.

epiphytology

the study of the character, ecology, and causes of plant diseases, as blight, which destroy a large number of susceptible plants in a large area simultaneously. —epiphytologist, n.

ethnobotany

a specialty in botany that studies the lore and uses of plants as illustrative of the customs of a (usually primitive) society. —ethnobotanist, n. —ethnobotanic, ethnobotanical, adj.

filicology

the study of ferns. Cf. pteridology. —filicologist. n.

fungology

the scientific study of fungi. —fungologist, n. —fungological, adj.

graminology

agrostology. —graminologist, n. —graminologic, graminological, adj.

herbalist

Obsolete, a descriptive botanist. See also 319. PLANTS .

herbarian, herbarist

Obsolete, a herbalist.

herbarism

Obsolete, botany.

herbarium

a collection of dried plants, assembled and arranged for botanical study.

lichenology

the study of lichens. —lichenologist, n. —lichenologic, lichenological, adj.

Linneanism

a system of botanical nomenclature following the binomial procedures established by Swedish botanist Carl von Linné. —Linnaean, Linnean, adj.

muscology

the study of mosses. —muscologist, n.

mycology

1. the branch of botany that studies fungi.

2. a catalogue of the fungi found in a specific area. —mycologist, n. —mycologie, mycological, adj.

orchidology

the branch of botany or horticulture that studies orchids. —orchidologist , n.

phycography

a scientific description of seaweed. —phycographic , adj.

phycology

algology. —phycologist , n.

phylum

any of the basic divisions of the plant or animal kingdom. Cf. phylon .

phytogenesis

the science and history of the development of plants. Also phytogeny. —phytogenetic , phytogenetical , adj.

phytogeography

the study of plants according to their geographical distribution. —phytogeographer , n. —phytogeographic, phytogeographical , adj.

phytography

the branch of botany that studies plant measurement and plant taxonomy. —phytographer, phytographist , n. —phytographic, phytographical , adj.

phytology

botany.

phytosociology

the branch of ecology that studies the interrelations of plants and plant communities. —phytosociologist , n. —phytosociologic, phytosociological . adj.

pomology

1. the branch of botany that studies the cultivation of fruit.

2. the science of growing, storing, and processing fruit. —pomologist , n.

pteridography

the systematic description of ferns.

pteridology

the branch of botany that studies ferns. Cf. filicology . —pteridologist , n.

Schwendenerism

the theory that lichens are parasitic fungi growing upon algae, first advanced by the German botanist S. Schwendener.

sphagnology

the study of the sphagnum mosses. —sphagnologist , n.

stirpiculture

selective breeding to develop strains with particular characteristics. —stirpicultural , adj.

symphyogenesis

production by union of elements that were formerly separate. —symphyogenetic , adj.

tautonym

a botanical or zoological name in which two terms are combined, the generic name and the specific, with both being the same. (a practice no longer approved by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature.)

uredinology

a branch of mycology that studies rusts. —uredinologist , n.

Botany

Botany is the scientific study of plants. While early humans were very knowledgeable about identifying harmful and beneficial plants, the ancient Greeks were the first to study plants scientifically (or for the sake of gaining knowledge rather than any practical purpose). The study of plants greatly expanded with the seventeenth-century invention of the microscope and today, modern botany uses a whole range of tools that investigate plants at their genetic level.

Plants are multicelled organisms that live by making their own food using the process of photosynthesis to harness the energy of sunlight and convert it into food. Plants are essential to all living things since they provide food, oxygen, energy, and even wood. Since early humans were hunter-gatherers before they learned how to farm, it was especially important to know which plants were good to eat and which were not. Some plants were sometimes found to have medical uses. Until the Greeks studied plants in the fourth century, knowledge of plants consisted primarily of the following types of practical information—which plants were safe, which were harmful, and which were good to cure illness.

THEOPHRASTUS CONSIDERED THE FOUNDER OF BOTANY

The Greek scholar Theophrastus (c.372–c.287 b.c.) began to study plants as life-forms worthy of study by themselves rather than sources of food or drugs. His work, titled Enquiry into Plants, survives today and has earned him the title "founder of botany." In this work he studied a wide range of plants and discussed seeds, budding, and the effects of disease

and weather. He also attempted a classification of plants and described their different parts. Following Theophrastus, other Greeks and Romans were more interested in the practical aspects of plants and most books written were "herbals" or works that contained mainly medicinal (and sometimes mythical) information on plants. The tradition of herbals, which stressed plants that were useful to people, continued throughout medieval times and the Renaissance.

OTHERS EXPAND ON THEOPHRASTUS'S WORK

By the middle of the sixteenth century, the scientific tradition begun by Theophrastus was revived in Germany as several naturalists began to produce botanical books that were based on facts rather than on the elaborate and sometimes fantastic claims of the herbals. These naturalists also began to investigate plant anatomy (the structure or parts of plants) and plant physiology (the internal life processes that take place). This scientific tradition was reinforced in the next century by the invention of the microscope, which allowed a better view of a plant's minute parts. By the end of the seventeenth century, plant anatomy was being studied seriously and many correct scientific discoveries were being made. In 1682, the English physician Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) published The Anatomy of Plants in which he displayed eighty-three full-page plates of microscopic sections of plant stems and roots. Grew was the first to state that flowers contained a plant's sexual reproductive organs. His work and that of others led to the landmark work of the Swedish clergyman and naturalist, Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778). After traveling through much of Europe studying plants, Linnaeus published in 1735 his System of Nature in which he created the modern form of systematic classification known as the binomial (two name) system. The first name he used was the genus, or the type of group, to which they belonged. This was followed by the species, or the particular name. His system soon became useful in classifying all living things. Following Linnaeus, botanists became increasingly specialized and nineteenth-century botany became best known for its discovery of photosynthesis and of the cellular structure of plants. By 1900, the earlier work of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), in which he worked out the actual laws of inheritance based on his work breeding pea plants, became well known and modern botany truly began.

Today, the study of botany has many interconnected branches. The major areas of investigation are plant anatomy or the study of the internal arrangement of plant parts; plant physiology or the processes (like photosynthesis) that take place inside a plant; plant morphology or the external or visible arrangement of a plant's parts; plant taxonomy or the identification and classification of plants; plant cytology or the study of plant cells; plant genetics or the study of plant inheritance; plant ecology or the study of a plant's relationship to its surroundings; plant paleobotany or the study of fossil plants; dendochronology or tree-ring dating; and ethnobotany or the relations between humans and plants (especially the identification of plants with medical properties).

THEOPHRASTUS

Greek botanist Theophrastus (327 b.c.–287 b.c.) is considered the father of botany, the scientific study of plants. He was the first to study plants solely for their own sake and not just to learn how they might be put to some practical use. Although few of his writings remain, what did survive became the principle source of botanical information for centuries.

Theophrastus was born on the Greek island of Lesbos and was lucky to study as a very young man with the great Greek philosopher, Plato (c.427 b.c.–c.347 b.c.). After Plato's death, Theophrastus met and became a lifelong friend of the second great philosopher of the ancient world, Aristotle (384 b.c.–322 b.c.). In fact, it was Aristotle who gave him his nickname "Theophrastus," meaning "divine speech." Aristotle had founded a school called the Lyceum which Theophrastus took over after Aristotle's retirement. Under Theophrastus's leadership, the school reached its highest point. There, he carried on Artistotle's teachings in biology, although he concentrated on the study of plants (botany), where Aristotle had specialized in the study of animals (zoology).

Although Theophrastus is believed to have written a great deal on many different subjects, only a small portion of his botanical work survived. In these works, he covered every major aspect of plants—their description, classification, and distribution as well as how plants propagate (reproduce). Significantly, he described the formation of the plant in the seed as being like the fetus of an animal, something produced by it but not a part of it. He identified and grouped more than five hundred species and varieties of plants from those he knew, as well as those from neighboring lands. He classified plants into trees, shrubs, undershrubs, and herbs and developed a way of naming plants based on their external and internal parts, which he called organs and tissues. He also described sexual reproduction in flowering plants, as well as seed germination (when a seed starts to grow and puts out a root) and development. Although the real function of pollen (dustlike grains that contain the plant's male sex cells) was not understood, he wrote detailed descriptions of how to pollinate certain fruit-bearing trees. His knowledge of plants was such that he knew that some flowers bear petals while others do not, and that there were major differences in the seed structure of flowering plants (called angiosperms) and cone-bearing trees (called gymnosperms). In fact, he is credited with inventing the term "gymnosperm" which in Greek means "naked seed." Finally, he described how Greek farmers used certain bean crops to enrich the soil. Today, farmers know that important nitrates (salts from nitric acid) are formed by bacteria that live on the roots of these bean plants, and that they add important nitrogen (a nonmetalic element) to the soil.

Theophrastus is rightly considered to be the founder of botany. Unlike many who followed him, his plant study was focused on learning about plants not for their practical uses (which are many and important), but from a purely scientific aspect, simply in order to learn more about them. His one surviving botanical work contains all the essentials of what today is considered scientific botany. He observed, collected, and systematized his botanical information, and wrote in a clear and accurate manner. Although missing from his work are all of the fabulous folk tales that surrounded plant lore, he brought a scientific mentality to the study of plants. In many ways, Theophrastus was more modern than anyone who followed him for the next two thousand years.

[See alsoPlant Anatomy; Plant Hormones; Plant Pathology; Plant Reproduction; Plants ]

Botany

History of botany

Resources

Botany is the study of plants. It is one of the major fields of biology, together with zoology (the study of animals) and microbiology (the study of bacteria and viruses). Specializations within the field of botany include the study of mosses, algae, lichens, ferns, and fungi. Other specialties in botany include plant physiology, the study of the vital processes of plants, such as photosynthesis, respiration, and plant nutrition. Biochemists study the effects of soil, temperature, and light on plants, while plant morphologists study of the evolution and development of leaves, roots, and stems with a focus on the tissues at the tips of stems where the cells have the ability to divide.

Plant pathology studies the causes and control of plant diseases. Pathologists may work with a specific group of plants, such as forest trees, vegetable crops, grain, or ornamental plants, and they may concentrate on the interactions between host plants and pathogens, the carriers of disease. Economic botanists study the economic impact of plants as they relate to human needs for food, clothing, and shelter, while plant geneticists investigate the structure and behavior of genes in plants and plant heredity in order to develop crops that are resistant to diseases and pests. Paleobotany deals with the biology and evolution of plants by studying the fossil record in order to reconstruct the 600 million year history of plant life on this planet.

The relationship between plants and animals is one of interdependence. Without the evolution of plants, animals would not have been able to subsist. Animals, in turn, contribute to plant distribution, plant pollination, and every other aspect of plant growth and development. Through this interdependence, plants continue to adapt and change. Human intervention in the cultivation of plants has contributed equally to plant development. Today, the study of botany is only one aspect of ecology, the study of the environment. Plant ecologists are concerned with the effects of the environment on plants.

History of botany

Aristotle and Theophrastus, living in ancient Greece about the fourth century BC, were both involved in identifying plants and describing them. Theophrastus is called the father of botany because of his two surviving works on plant studies. While Aristotle also wrote about plants, he received more recognition for his studies of animals.

The early study of plants was not limited to Western cultures. The Chinese developed the study of botany along lines similar to the ancient Greeks at about the same time. In AD 60, another Greek, Dioscorides, wrote De Materia Medica, a work that described a thousand medicines, 60% of which came from plants. It remained the guidebook on medicines in the Western world for 1,500 years until the compound microscope was invented in the late sixteenth century, opening the way to the careful study of plant anatomy.

During the seventeenth century progress was made in experimenting with plants. Johannes van Helmont measured the uptake of water in a tree during the 1640s, and in 1727 Stephen Hales (1677–1761), an Englishman who is credited with establishing plant physiology as a science, published his experiments dealing with the nutrition and respiration of plants in a work entitled Vegetable Staticks. He developed techniques to measure area, volume, mass, pressure, gravity, and temperature in plants. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) laid the foundation for the chemical analysis of plant metabolism.

During the nineteenth century advances were made in the study of plant diseases because of the potato blight that killed potato crops in Ireland in the 1840s, an event that led to a mass migration of Irish to America. The study of plant diseases developed rapidly after this event. When the work in genetics by Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), an Austrian monk, was applied after 1900 to plant breeding, the development of modern plant genetics began. During the early part of the nineteenth century, progress in the study of plant fossils was made, and ecology began to develop as a science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Technology has helped specialists in botany to see and understand the three-dimensional nature of cells, and genetic engineering of plants has improved agricultural output. The study of plants continues as botanists try to both understand the structure, behavior, and cellular activities of plants in order to develop better crops, find new medicines, and explore ways of maintaining an ecological balance on Earth to continue to sustain both plant and animal life.

See also Taxonomy.

Resources

BOOKS

Campbell, N., J. Reece, and L. Mitchell. Biology. 5th ed. Menlo Park: Benjamin Cummings, Inc. 2000.

Evans, Howard Ensign. Pioneer Naturalists. New York: Holt, 1993.

Heiser, Charles B. Of Plants and People. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.

Morton, A.G. History of Botanical Science. London: Academic Press, 1981.

Roth, Charles E. The Plant Observer’s Guidebook. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984.

OTHER

National Biological Information Infrastructure. “Botany” <http://www.nbii.gov/disciplines/botany> (accessed November 6, 2006).

Vita Richman