EARLY BOTANICAL LITERATURE. 
2 7 
pean flora. Later, as explorations came to be made in distant 
parts of the world, voluminous floras of tropical regions appeared 
like those of Rheede for the East Indies (1686), in twelve folio 
volumes, Sir Hans Sloane for Jamaica (1707), and Plunder for 
Martinique and Hispaniola (1703). Many living exotics were 
also introduced into European gardens and elaborate publications 
were issued describing and illustrating large numbers of these 
plants. Linnaeus himself published the Hortus Cliffortianus in 
1:737, a folio describing the plants growing in the gardens of 
George Clifford at Hartecamp in Holland, and among similar 
works were the Hortus Elthamensis (1732) by Dillenius, Com- 
melim-is* Horti medici, Amsteiodamends. Plantarum (1697), and 
the Hortus Monspeliensis (1697), the first describing plants from 
the Eltham gardens in Kent, the second those from the gardens 
at Amsterdam, and the third those cultivated at Montpelier in 
France. Works of these three classes with many others form 
the enormous volume of early botanical literature from which 
Linnaeus in 1753 compiled his Species Plantarum which reduced 
the description and classification of known plants to the compass 
of 1,200 rather small octavo pages. To accomplish the easy 
designation of individual species he borrowed the plan more or 
less current among his predecessors of giving each species a 
binary name—Latin, of course, as the work was printed in that 
language. As this was the first simple and general enumeration 
of plants with the present day binomial nomenclature uniformly 
and consistently used, it has been decided to make the date of 
publication of the first edition of Species Plantarum —1753—the 
initial point of modern nomenclature. 
It must here be emphasized that Linnaeus did not invent this 
system of naming plants, and that he merely borrowed it and 
made its use uniform. Caspar Bauhin had used binomials ex¬ 
tensively nearly fifty years before Linnaeus was born, and others 
used them quite frequently. Neither must it be supposed that 
Linnaeus founded the categories of classification, for genera date 
back to Tournefort’s Institutiones , the classic of early systematic 
botany, published in 1700, and this is supplemented for the crypto¬ 
gams by Micheli’s work published in 1728. 
