The Bicentennial of Michel Adanson's "Familles de Plantes", Part One.

Pittsburgh:: Hunt Botanical Library, 1963., 1963. Hunt Monograph Series, no. 1. 8vo. xi, 391 pp. Illus., index. Light teal gilt-stamped printed wrappers; faded spine, rubbed extremities. Very good. Michel Adanson was an 18th-century French botanist and naturalist who traveled to Senegal to study flora and fauna. He proposed a "natural system" of taxonomy distinct from the binomial system forwarded by Linnaeus. In 1763 he published his Familles naturelles des plantes. In this work he developed the principle of arrangement above mentioned, which, in its adherence to natural botanical relations, was based on the system of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, and had been anticipated to some extent nearly a century before by John Ray. The success of this work was hindered by its innovations in the use of terms, which were ridiculed by the defenders of the popular sexual system of Linnaeus; but it did much to open the way for the establishment, by means principally of Antoine Laurent de Jussieu's Genera Plantarum (1789), of the natural method of the classification of plants.