A Short History of Botany in Europe
Tools of Botanical Science
Botany (Greek - Βοτάνη - meaning grass, fodder; Medieval Latin - botanicus – herb, plant), along with zoology are the central disciplines of biology. Botany is closely related to the natural sciences of chemistry, geology and physics. It can be most obviously applied to horticulture and agriculture, but other topics such as plant pathology and floristry also apply. With the dawn of the computer age, botany has branched out to include molecular phylogenetics, which constitutes the disciplines of taxonomy and molecular biology.
Botany emerged when paleolithic hunter-gatherers began to empirically study plants, orally passing down what they learned from generation to generation. There is evidence that primitive man used plants for food, clothing, shelter and medicine. About 10,000 years ago, with the first written languages, records of plants from the neolithic period emerged. Writings from agricultural communities during this era show a keen interest in plants as they learned from their environment. It wasn't until the teachings of Aristotle (384-382 BC) that humans became curious about the plants themselves, and not solely what use could be made of them. Aristotle wrote and illustrated pages grouping organisms by their single most prominent feature. The classification system we use today is descended from his teachings. Theophrastus (350 BC), a student of Aristotle, was most interested in plants. He studied them in depth and wrote a manuscript of his findings called Historia Plantarum. So, it was at the Lyceum in ancient Athens around 300 BC that modern botanical science began. Fast forward to 60 AD when Dioscorides, a Greek physician in the army of Emperor Nero of Rome, penned Materia Medica, chronicling over 600 medicinal plants. In 70 AD Pliny the Elder, wrote Naturalis Historia, which is in essence an ancient encyclopedia. It is one of the largest works to have survived from the Roman Empire.
After Pliny the Elder, interest in botanical science wavered and little progress was made in the field. Botany was abandoned as Europe entered the Dark Ages. Vandals sacked Rome in 455 AD burning an pillaging as they went and much of what had been learned was lost. As Rome fell in 476 AD, so did the sciences. Very few documents exist from this era or the Middle ages.
Many years later, botany became of interest to a German Dominican frier by the name of Albert Magnus (1250 AD) who further classified leafy plants as either monocots or dicots. Then the study of plants began anew. About 1400 AD, with the invention of the printing press, Hortus Sanitatis was published by an unknown author. It was the first book to be known as an "herbal" and was a compilation of plant folklore and crude illustrations. The idea caught on across Europe during the Medieval period and botany began to include the study of the medicinal properties of herbs and flowers. Funded by the Catholic Church, monks experimented extensively with plants for many years. They published their new findings as well as past works of antiquity in more books. The Greco-Roman studies on medicinal plants were preserved and extended by Arab and Chinese scientists.
With the European Renaissance of the 14th-17th centuries came scientific revival and botany gradually separated from natural history to become a distinct discipline of its own separate from medicine and agriculture. The German "Fathers of Botany" (Otto Brunfels, Hieronymus Bock, and Leonhart Fuchs) studied plants in depth and opened new frontiers in botanical science during the mid 1500s. They published books containing concise descriptions of 567 species of plants. Yet another German by the name of Valerius Cordus also pioneered the field of botany by identifying and describing several new species including both flowers and fruits. He also wrote one of the most prodigious pharmacopoeia and one of the most applauded herbals of all time. In England, William Turner wrote Libellus De Re Herbaria Novus in 1538 describing many native British plants and the locations where they can be found. Herbals gave way to "Flora"; books describing plants native to a certain region. Information in these books were often verified by specimens kept in a herbarium, which is a collection of dried plants that confirmed the plant descriptions given in the Floras. The transition from herbal to Flora marked the final separation of botany from medicine. Soon, plant anatomy would emerge with the invention of the microscope in 1644 and the first experiments of plant physiology would be performed. As means of travel improved and commerce grew between continents, new plants where discovered demanding an accurate process of identification. Each new species was subjected to naming, description and classification. Major discoveries took place as an English scientist named Robert Hooke discovered and named the cell, called so after their resemblance to the cells of monks. And in the mid 1700s, the Swiss scientist, Carl Linnaeus formulated the system of binomial nomenclature. Finally, in 1801, A French scientist first coined the term "biology" and life sciences were born.
Plant biology and botany has continued to expand throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. As the frontiers of invention broadened, modern branches of plant science came into being, such as ecology, biogeography, cell theory and biochemistry. The electron microscope, radio isotopes and fractionation have helped scientists to look deeper into the complex world of the kingdom Plantae.
Botany emerged when paleolithic hunter-gatherers began to empirically study plants, orally passing down what they learned from generation to generation. There is evidence that primitive man used plants for food, clothing, shelter and medicine. About 10,000 years ago, with the first written languages, records of plants from the neolithic period emerged. Writings from agricultural communities during this era show a keen interest in plants as they learned from their environment. It wasn't until the teachings of Aristotle (384-382 BC) that humans became curious about the plants themselves, and not solely what use could be made of them. Aristotle wrote and illustrated pages grouping organisms by their single most prominent feature. The classification system we use today is descended from his teachings. Theophrastus (350 BC), a student of Aristotle, was most interested in plants. He studied them in depth and wrote a manuscript of his findings called Historia Plantarum. So, it was at the Lyceum in ancient Athens around 300 BC that modern botanical science began. Fast forward to 60 AD when Dioscorides, a Greek physician in the army of Emperor Nero of Rome, penned Materia Medica, chronicling over 600 medicinal plants. In 70 AD Pliny the Elder, wrote Naturalis Historia, which is in essence an ancient encyclopedia. It is one of the largest works to have survived from the Roman Empire.
After Pliny the Elder, interest in botanical science wavered and little progress was made in the field. Botany was abandoned as Europe entered the Dark Ages. Vandals sacked Rome in 455 AD burning an pillaging as they went and much of what had been learned was lost. As Rome fell in 476 AD, so did the sciences. Very few documents exist from this era or the Middle ages.
Many years later, botany became of interest to a German Dominican frier by the name of Albert Magnus (1250 AD) who further classified leafy plants as either monocots or dicots. Then the study of plants began anew. About 1400 AD, with the invention of the printing press, Hortus Sanitatis was published by an unknown author. It was the first book to be known as an "herbal" and was a compilation of plant folklore and crude illustrations. The idea caught on across Europe during the Medieval period and botany began to include the study of the medicinal properties of herbs and flowers. Funded by the Catholic Church, monks experimented extensively with plants for many years. They published their new findings as well as past works of antiquity in more books. The Greco-Roman studies on medicinal plants were preserved and extended by Arab and Chinese scientists.
With the European Renaissance of the 14th-17th centuries came scientific revival and botany gradually separated from natural history to become a distinct discipline of its own separate from medicine and agriculture. The German "Fathers of Botany" (Otto Brunfels, Hieronymus Bock, and Leonhart Fuchs) studied plants in depth and opened new frontiers in botanical science during the mid 1500s. They published books containing concise descriptions of 567 species of plants. Yet another German by the name of Valerius Cordus also pioneered the field of botany by identifying and describing several new species including both flowers and fruits. He also wrote one of the most prodigious pharmacopoeia and one of the most applauded herbals of all time. In England, William Turner wrote Libellus De Re Herbaria Novus in 1538 describing many native British plants and the locations where they can be found. Herbals gave way to "Flora"; books describing plants native to a certain region. Information in these books were often verified by specimens kept in a herbarium, which is a collection of dried plants that confirmed the plant descriptions given in the Floras. The transition from herbal to Flora marked the final separation of botany from medicine. Soon, plant anatomy would emerge with the invention of the microscope in 1644 and the first experiments of plant physiology would be performed. As means of travel improved and commerce grew between continents, new plants where discovered demanding an accurate process of identification. Each new species was subjected to naming, description and classification. Major discoveries took place as an English scientist named Robert Hooke discovered and named the cell, called so after their resemblance to the cells of monks. And in the mid 1700s, the Swiss scientist, Carl Linnaeus formulated the system of binomial nomenclature. Finally, in 1801, A French scientist first coined the term "biology" and life sciences were born.
Plant biology and botany has continued to expand throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. As the frontiers of invention broadened, modern branches of plant science came into being, such as ecology, biogeography, cell theory and biochemistry. The electron microscope, radio isotopes and fractionation have helped scientists to look deeper into the complex world of the kingdom Plantae.
