Posted
on December 9, 2014
Is
it a pansy or a petunia? A rose or a rhododendron?
And
which flowering plants are closely related to one another?
As
long as people have been people, they knew a lot about plants. They
closely studied the leaves and flowers, cones and barks, roots and
fruits of plants, and they discovered the food and medicine value of
the various parts of plants. People passed on this knowledge to
younger generations verbally and, once writing was invented, through
written texts.
Centuries
ago, scientists began to codify this “folk knowledge” that had
been passed on from parents to children to grandchildren. They began
to categorize things more exactly, and they began to name things
scientifically. I'm sure you get that the same plant has different
names in different languages: a rose may be warda, roz,
roos, bunga mawar, gul, or ruusu,
depending on where you live and what language you speak –
but it will still, as Shakespeare pointed out, smell as sweet. But
once scientists gave the rose one scientific name (in this case genus
Rosa), everyone could communicate more easily. (Specific types
of roses have different species names: Rosa majalis, Rosa
moschata, Rosa woodsii, and so on.)
Today's
famous birthday contributed to those early attempts to categorize and
name plants. Augustus Quirinus Rivinus, also called Augustus
Bachmann, was born in Germany on this date in 1652. He became a
doctor of medicine, and he also studied botany and astronomy. He
became a professor of pathology (the study of disease), physiology
(the study of living systems), and botany (the study of plants). He
was put in charge of his university's medical garden.
It
was Rivinus who first consistently used genus and species names, such
as the scientific rose names discussed above. Carl Linnaeus got
credit for the naming scheme we currently use for organisms, and
Linnaeus used several of Rivinus's innovations.
Another
thing that Rivinus promoted through his use was the dichotomous
key. This sort of key is useful for people to determine the identity
of an animal, plant, or other organism. There are a series of steps
with just two choices; when the user makes her choice, she
branches to another question with two choices. This process goes on
and on until she arrives at the name of the organism she is trying to
identify.
- Check out this example of an online dichotomous key.
- Learn how to make a dichotomous key at Enchanted Learning.
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| It can be fun to make a dichotomous key for your own imagined fantasy creatures! |
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