A letter of Andrea Cesalpino.

Abstract

The publication in 1583 of Andrea Cesalpino's De Plantis Libri XVI was an important event in the revival of botany in Europe after the Middle Ages. Published in Florence as a quarto volume of some 650 pages, this famous work (hereinafter referred to as De Plantis) had a profound influence on the future course of botanical science and especially on the development of plant classification. Cesalpino1 was Professor of Medicine and Botany at the University of Pisa, and Director of the Pisa Botanical Garden, from 1555 to 1592. Many later botanists, among them John Ray, Linnaeus, and Julius Sachs, have paid tribute to the great advances in botany resulting from his work. More recent studies of Cesalpino's place in the history of botany include those by Bremekamp (1953) and Morton (1981 a, b), and further discussion will not be attempted here. The purpose of this communication is to draw attention to a personal letter written by Cesalpino in 1563, twenty years before he published De Plantis. In this intimate letter to his friend and patron Alphonso Tornabuoni,2 he expresses some of his thoughts on the problem of a scientific classification of plants and indicates how he tried in practice to approach such a classification. The principles worked out in philosophical depth in 1583 are here only informally outlined but his mature concepts and methods are already foreshadowed.