Publish a selection from Hernández manuscripts, New World’s plants

For instance, the Accademia dei Lincei, which included Galileo, took eighty years to publish a selection from Hernández’s manuscripts. This was despite the fact that knowledge of the New World’s plants was improving, but many of these descriptions had not yet been published. Hernández had collected about 1,300 plant species in Mexico in the 1570s. Many New World flora and animals were originally described in the Lynx’s edition of Hernández, although they were still organized according to European notions.

While the Badianus manuscript and Hernández’s own ideas are similar, the editors of the former chose to organize the plants of the New World according to Dioscorides’ theories about which parts of the body they could treat. This strategy made the plants of the New World more useful, but it also forced them into categories used in the Old World, making them appear more familiar than they actually were.

Not only did Europeans use their concepts and taxonomies to classify and name American species, but many of the newly introduced plants to Europe (such as tomatoes, maize, and tobacco) spread so fast that botanists occasionally confused the origin of a plant with its novelty. Consequently, Europeans didn’t completely appreciate the uniqueness of American plants until the 17th and 18th centuries.

French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, a contemporary of Ray’s, argued that a radical reorganization of plant classification was necessary due to the exponential increase in the number of known plant species. He argued that naturalists would be better off if they avoided being overwhelmed by the species and instead used the more generalized genus (meaning “race” or “stock” in Greek) as the basic unit of study. Although he wasn’t the first, Tournefort provided the clearest definition of genera (the plural of genus) by classifying plants according to shared characteristics in fruit and the structure of the petals (the corolla) of flowers.

The asymmetrical blossoms of orchids were one of the defining characteristics that allowed him to classify them into an order in his Élémens de Botanique (1694), which is approximately analogous to what modern botanists would term a family. Orchids were only considered related for about 2,000 years, when the seventeenth century saw the start of their formal recognition as a family. This was due to the fact that only a small number of species shared the distinctive testicle-like tubers. The idea that orchids belonged to a family didn’t spread immediately since Tournefort’s system of classification was just one of many; nonetheless, this didn’t slow down the orchid family’s rapid expansion.

One of the earliest big tropical floras, the enormous Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, emerged in its last volume around the same time as Tournefort was deciding on the group’s name. It was the idea of the Dutch governor of the Malabar region of India (now the state of Kerala), Hendrik Adriaan Van Rheede tot Draakenstein, also known as Van Rheede. He utilized his position to oversee the creation of the Hortus Malabaricus, a work that reflected his profound passion in botany.

A group of over 200 local specialists, including numerous Indian priests and doctors versed in traditional plant-based medicines, as well as four soldiers from the Dutch East India Company’s army who created the stunning illustrations, labored tirelessly for thirty years to compile it into its twelve substantial volumes.

As a result, Van Rheede joined the ranks of the first Europeans to record the characteristics of tree-dwelling tropical orchids. In his report of his visit to Jamaica, Sloane referred about these orchids, which were often thought of as parasites, and he erroneously labeled them mistletoe. Their subsequent rebranding as “air-plants” was due to Van Rheede’s realization that “they did not harm” the trees they grew on; rather, they only utilized the trees as supports. Epiphytes, meaning “upon-plant” or “one that grows on another,” is the modern term used by botanists and gardeners to describe these plants.

Only a small percentage of orchid species actually have the paired tubers that gave them their original name; the vast majority of orchids on Earth are either epiphytic or lithophytic, meaning they grow on stones instead of soil.