Pinning down Linnaean names

摘要

Linnaeus named more than 9,000 plants but modern botanists need herbarium specimens linked to those names. CHARLIE JARVIS describes the 25-year project to do this. THAT SCIENTISTS in Moscow, Sydney, Delhi or Washington can communicate about plants, and be sure that they are discussing the same species, is thanks to the 18th-centuiy Swedish physician Carl Linnaeus. In compiling his great work Species Plantarum (1753), Linnaeus provided a two-word Latin name composed of a genus name followed by a species name, for each of the approximately 5,900 plants that he catalogued there (see illustration, p37). He did not initially intend these shorthand names to replace the longer phrase names that he regarded as a plant's true name, but the fact that binomials were so much more memorable and useful meant that they were taken up quite rapidly by other biologists. Who could remember Erica antheris bifidis simplidbus exsertis, corottis ovatis, sublanfforibus,foliis quaternis triangularibus patentibus when Erica cornea was so much more succinct?