Meet the family
http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5135546
Nov 10th 2005
From The Economist print edition
AGRICULTURE and horticulture are among man's most ancient activities,
so it is remarkable that ignorance about the basic mechanics of plant
life persisted until the late 1600s when John Ray, one of the heroes of
this splendid book, effectively invented the study of botany.
In the preceding centuries, numerous scholars had grappled with the
mystery of how plants are created and reproduce, how they relate to
each other and how to tell whether a newly discovered specimen is
something really new or a variety of a known species: a critical
consideration in deciding what to call it. Evidence of the failure to
find answers lies in the consistently unreliable plant guides and
"herbals" compiled between the third century BC, when Theophrastus,
a Greek philosopher, produced the first known work in the field, and
1633, when Thomas Johnson published his revised and corrected edition
of a herbal that had been written nearly 40 years earlier by a fellow
Englishman, John Gerard.
The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants
By Anna Pavord
Bloomsbury; 384 pages; $45 and £30
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