FLORAL SEXUAL ANATOMY: Georg Dionysius Ehret, one of the most esteemed botanical illustrators of the 18th century, drew this example of Carl Linnaeus’s plant classification system based on the sexual parts of flowers. Ehret had been working for George Clifford, a wealthy banker, when he met Linnaeus in the mid-1730s. Clifford had hired Ehret to do some artwork based on the plant collection in his gardens and greenhouses, and during this time, in 1736, Ehret also painted this iconic image of floral sex parts (assigning letters to Linnaeus’s numbered classes). Charlie Jarvis of the Natural History Museum in London says there was some dispute between Linnaeus and Ehret as to who invented the classification system, but ultimately Linnaeus earned the credit.WIKIPEDIACarl Linnaeus’s lasting legacy, hands down, is binomial nomenclature. He transformed what was once a clunky system for naming organisms, involving a formal name and a lengthy description, into a simple, two-part title. Such efficiency was wildly popular among taxonomists in the 18th century, and binomial nomenclature has withstood centuries of scientific progress toward understanding the relationships among organisms.
But in the 1730s, the self-proclaimed “prince of botany” made a contribution to taxonomy that, at the time, was just as profound as any of his other achievements. After realizing that floral sex parts varied in number, Linnaeus developed a plant classification system based on their sexual anatomy. The number of stamens (which produce male gametes), their length, and whether the stamens were fused relegated a plant to one of 23 Classes (there was a 24th class, nonflowering plants); the plant’s Order was then determined by pistils, the female structures. “I think it was quite enthusiastically taken up because of its simplicity,” says Charlie Jarvis, an expert on Linnaeus’s botanical nomenclature at the Natural History Museum in London.
Linnaeus’s focus on the arrangement of plants’ ...
