Top 5 Famous Botanists of the World

Here is a list of top five famous botanists in world.

Botanist # 1. Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778):

Carl Linnaeus, also known as Carl von Linne or Carolus Linnaeus, is also called the Father of Taxonomy. He developed a system for naming, ranking, and classifying organisms which is still in wide use today, however with many changes.

He was born on May 23,1707, in Rashult in Southern Sweden and he showed a deep love and fascination for plants right from a very early age.

He joined the University of Lund to study medicine in 1727, and a year later, he transferred to the University of Uppsala, the most prestigious university in Sweden, where he spent most of his time collecting and studying plants, his true love, as at that time, training in botany was part of the medical curriculum and every doctor had to prepare and prescribe drugs derived from medicinal plants.

Linnaeus mounted a botanical and ethnographical expedition to Lapland in 1731 and to central Sweden in 1734.

A year later in 1735, he went to the Netherlands and promptly finished his medical degree at the University of Harderwijk. Later, he enrolled in the University of Leiden for further studies and that same year, he published the first edition of his classification of living things, the Systerna Naturae.

In 1738, he returned back to Sweden where he practiced medicine (specializing in the treatment of syphilis) and lectured in Stockholm, before being awarded a professorship at Uppsala in 1741.

At Uppsala, he restored the University’s botanical garden (arranging the plants according to his system of classification) and made three more expeditions to various parts of Sweden. Inspired by him, many of his students made exploration voyages to different parts of the world such as Australia, Europe, north-eastern American colonies, Japan, South America, south-east Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

In the meantime, Linnaeus continued to revise his Systema Naturae, which grew to a multi- volume work, as his concepts were modified and as more and more plant and animal specimens were sent to him from different parts of the world by his students and other European botanists.

In 1758, he bought the manor estate of Hammarby, outside Uppsala, where he built a small museum for his extensive personal collections and in 1761, he was granted nobility, and became Carl von Linne.

Linnaeus died in 1778 and his son, also named Carl, succeeded him as a professor at Uppsala. But he never proved to be noteworthy as a botanist.

The younger Carl died five years later with no heirs, and following his death, his mother and sisters sold the elder Linnaeus’s library, manuscripts, and natural history collections to the English natural historian Sir James Edward Smith, who founded the Linnean Society of London in 1788, to take care of them.

Botanist # 2. John Ray (1628-1705):

John Ray was born in the village of Black Notley, Essex, England on November 29, 1627. His father was a blacksmith, and his mother was known as a healer and herbalist. His love for nature, and especially for plants was perhaps gained from his mother. He joined the Cambridge University in 1644, and rapidly became expert in languages, mathematics, and natural science.

He later became a Fellow of Cambridge University in 1649, a Lecturer in 1651, and a junior Dean in 1658. In 1660 he was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church. However, due to political reasons, he left Cambridge and between 1660 and 1671 he made many trips throughout England to collect plants, animals, and rocks. He also did experimental work in embryology and plant physiology.

He was the first person to prove that the wood of a living tree conducts water and this work won him a place in the newly formed Royal Society of London, one of the world’s first scientific societies, in 1667. He spent the last decades of his life writing books on languages, theology, and natural history.

He died on January 17, 1705. Some of his famous works include Catalogue of Cambridge Plants (1660) and Synopsis Methodica Avium et Piscium. Ray also published systematic works on plants, birds, mammals, fishes, and insects.

Botanist # 3. Charles Edwin Bessey (1845-1915):

C.E. Bessey who trained under Asay Gray and then became a Professor of Botany at the University of Nebraska, proposed a phylogenetic system of classification in 1894, which reflected the evolutionary ideas of Darwin which had greatly impressed him. His system was however published in the final form in 1915 in a paper entitled ” The phylogenetic taxonomy of flowering plants”.

In his earlier works he had followed Bentham and Hooker’s system of classification, but finally came to the synthesis of his own system, which was based on certain guiding principles of primitive and advanced characters called dicta, in which the most primitive modern plants were the Ranunculus’s. He believed that both the monocots and dicots arose from within the Ranunculus’s, along three major lines.

This system is often called Ranalian concept of evolution. On being shown in the diagrammatic form, his system took the form of a cactus plant, which came to be known as “Bessey’s Cactus” (Fig. 7.1) or as “Opuntia besseyi“.

Bessey believed in the monophyletic origin of angiosperms and his ideas were based on the belief that flowering plants arose from the extinct, Mesozoic cycad-like Bennetitales (= Cycadeoids). In these plants the reproductive structures consisted of cone-like strobili, with spirally arranged bracts, microsporophyll’s, and megasporophylls.

Bessey was of the view that these organs became transformed into, respectively, the perianth, stamens, and pistils of flowering plants. This hypothesis, and Bessey’s system generally, was largely accepted and taught in North America as it provided an useful illustration of how evolution had presumably taken place.

Botanist # 4. George Bentham (1800-1884) and Sir Joseph Hooker (1817-1911):

George Bentham, a self-trained British Botanist and Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (England), proposed a natural system of classification in their book Genera Plantarum, which includes three volumes containing the description of all known genera of seed plants in Latin and was published during July 1862 and April 1883.

This system of classification, which is clearly derived from the systems of de Jussieu and de Candolle, is the best and most accepted natural system and is still used and followed in several herbaria of the world, including India.

The Bentham and Hooker system of classification divided all the Phanerograms or seed plants into Dicotyledons, Gymnosperms and Monocotyledons, with Ranales placed in the beginning of the classification and grasses at the end.

The Genera Plantarum includes the generic descriptions of 92,205 species belonging to 7,569 genera of 200 families of flowering plants based on the personal observations of Bentham and Hooker. Large genera have been divided into sections and sub­sections and the description of the genera are complete and accurate.

Following is a table showing the number of Orders, Genera and Families described by Bentham and Hooker:

Botanist # 5. Adolf Engler (1844-1930) and Karl Pranti (1849-1893):

The system of plants classification proposed by Adolph Engler, a professor at the University of Berlin and Director of Berlin Botanical Garden, continues to be the most widely used phylogenetic system. This system which is largely based on an earlier little known system of Eichler, is credited more with its systematic thoroughness rather than its correctness and originality.

Engler along with his close associate Karl Pranti published this system in a great monumental work, entitled “Die naturlichen pflanzenfamilien” (1897-1915) which consisted of twenty volumes and provided keys and description for all the then known genera of algae, fungi, bryophytes and higher vascular plants.

This system is still used in most of the non-British herbaria of the world. A revised edition of this work entitled “Syllabus der pflanzenfamilien” was later again published by Engler in collaboration with Gilg in 1924 and with Diels in 1936.

The most noteworthy feature of Engler’s system is that, the families of higher vascular plants are arranged according to the increasing complexity of the flower. Naked flowers, which possess a bract-like perianth, are considered most primitive, while the more advanced ones show a differentiation in calyx and corolla.

The fusion of petals represents a more highly evolved stage. Thus, they considered apetalous and catkin-bearing Dicots primitive to the Dicots bearing petals and simple unisexual flowers. In this system the Monocots are placed before Dicots and the orchids, are considered to be more evolved than grasses. They recognized 280 families of flowering plants including those of gymnosperms.