Describing plants in a new mode: the introduction of dichotomies into sixteenth-century botanical literature

Abstract

The use of dichotomous tables to identify a plant and to visualize inter-relationships and differences between plants was commonly credited to the first edition of Flore françoise by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published in 1778. However, evidence for an origin of this technique in the seventeenth and sixteenth century also exists. The present paper scrutinizes the extra-botanical origin of dichotomous tables and suggests the first half of the sixteenth century as the time when they were introduced into botanical writings. Bracketed outlines, the common format of such dichotomous tables, evolved from a typographical artifice into a heuristic instrument for reasoning methodologically about plant characteristics (“differentiae”) and finally into a means of describing and ordering the plants themselves in a new manner.