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Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation

Exhibitions Online

Data from the Bibliography Department is featured in the following online exhibition.

Order from Chaos: Linnaeus Disposes

Carolus Linnaeus (also Carl von Linné, 1707–1778) was a Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist whose work laid the foundations of modern biological systematics and nomenclature. Long before Linnaeus, classical science was important in the shaping of subsequent science in the West. Transmitted through the cultures of the Mediterranean area, classical science was recovered during the Renaissance and ensuing Scientific Revolution and undergirded the search for a new botanical system. Drawing on the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, Linnaeus developed a coherent system for describing, classifying and naming organisms. Linnaeus' students traveled the globe to explore and collect information and specimens. Aspects of the Linnaean system have enabled amateurs and professionals worldwide to identify, name and describe plants for more than two centuries.

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William Curtis, Author of the Flora Londinensis, Botanical Magazine & c., engraving by F[rancis] Sansom (fl.1780s–1810s) for General Indexes to the Plants Contained in the First Forty-Two Volumes of the Botanical Magazine in Two Parts (London, Stephen Couchman, Throgmorton-Street; Sherwood, Neely, & Jones, 20, Paternoster-Row, 1817, frontispiece), HI Library call no. DQ2 C979.