Hunt Institute Archives Text Discovery Platform

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 kix this.
For instance let us take Onagraceae. This ending aceae is most typical of plant
family names. What is recognized but 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
the
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 xxxxxxxx counts fix of things, Counts of numbers of
stamens, counts of numbers of petals, etc. xxxxxxxx Wherever he found flowers
with the stamen numbers the same, he put them together, and I think he had total