Origin of the species and genus concepts: An anthropological perspective

Abstract

assembled [plants] by medicinal properties. Others have classified alphabetically, so that one can more easily store content in memory. ... But the classification that unites plants by their natural affinities may be considered the easiest, the surest and the most efficacious, be it for the memory or for the study of [a plant's secondaryj properties. In a natural system, then, genera and species are constituted neither from medicinal properties, nor by reason of some use, nor from the place in which they occur. These are all accidents. (Cesalpino 1583:26) By attempting to proceed straightaway to an account of the various virtues of natural kinds, without first carefully describing those kinds in regard to morphological similarities and differences, ancient and medieval herbalists succeeded only in confounding our spontaneous appreciation of natural relationships; "It seems," notes Tournefort, "that the more they enriched medicine, the more they threw botany into confusion" (1694:7). What is curious here is the suggestion that ancient natural history angled away from intuition. It is odd because Cesalpino and Tournefort did not presume that men and women before them had successfully classified plants or animals in accordance with such supposedly apparent intuitions - what Linnaeus (1715, sec. 168) would intend by primo intuitu ex facie externa. If the learned scholars of Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance ultimately failed on this score, then surely it would be folly to suppose that more primitive ancestors or contemporary preliterate peoples could