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Page 218 · DO #4666 · 231_Rogers_Bx2FF27_r
- Collection
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David James Rogers (1918–2007) papers
- Item/Folder
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Taximetrics Course - Student Reports, 1966–1968
- Digital Object
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DO #4666,
page 218
- Collection-level dates
- 1948–1977
Page transcription
page 6
Mr. Cesalpino was best known amongst taxonomists for the fact that he established a group of organisms which we now know and he used the same term or something similar to it. I don't know whether Mr. Cesalpino used that ending, Leguminosae as we know and they use today, was a group of organisms put together by Mr. Cesalpino on a different basis than had been done in the past. Other early authors were able to recognize such things as the compositae, these are terms I am sure that are in all of our vocabularies. We know approximately what these are. There are other families of plants recognized by us today which were very early established because of some inherent quality of the organisms. In the case of this particular group, it would certainly be the fruiting structure, this particular group would certainly be the total flowering mechanism that is the inflorescence structure, the inflorescence. We, incidentally, may recognize that in an historical development of things that there are in most of the plant families that we use today, the ending on the plant families is different from this. For instance let us take Onagraceae. This ending aceae is most typical of plant family names. What is recognized we don't use that one on some of these such as the Compositae and Leguminosae is that very early these very striking groups of related organisms were put together, and only later in time did we get this in here and this is an historical development that these people decided they wanted to recognize that somebody earlier had indeed done something useful. And so they have maintained those two forms for the plant families. Now shortly after Cesalpino and such people had discovered/Compositae and the Leguminosae and others of this nature, Linnaeus came along and his first endeavors intended to make some sort of an identifying system, and he used the "sexual system" for his classificatory scheme published in 1734. What this sexual system did was to essentially take counts of things, Counts of numbers of stamens, counts of numbers of petals, etc. Wherever he found flowers with the stamen numbers the same, he put them together, and I think he had/total