50 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How We Understood the Plants, December 7, 2005
This review is from: The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants (Hardcover)
The natural world presents innumerable objects which humans have needed to categorize and name; animals, germs, stars, storms, rocks, and other huge kingdoms have eventually been broken down into types and grouped so that we could begin to understand them. Such a process of categorization may have taken many centuries, and we have gotten better at it with a scientific understanding of the world, but the impulse has been there for as long as we have been thinking about the things around us. Plants have been one huge kingdom we have tried to understand in such a way, and in _The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants_ (Bloomsbury), Anna Pavord has made a big, magnificent book about this effort. She has dug back to the ancient Greeks, and shown how thinkers through the medieval ages and Renaissance tried to get a grasp on the disorderly plant kingdom, with eventual success even before the taxonomic standards laid down by Linnaeus which we still follow. It is, surprisingly, the pre-Linnaean efforts that Pavord has chronicled; at the end of the book, she gives an admittedly grudging nod to Linnaeus, who generally got plant classification wrong (and shocked eighteenth century bishops, since his classification dwelt on the "loathsome harlotry" of the immoral sexual behavior of the flowers). The story up to that time, however, makes for wonderful scholarship and tributes to the plantsmen who eventually made the jungle comprehensible.
Pavord has much to say about the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, not only in the beginning of the book, but throughout it, as she admires the depth of his accomplishments and wishes that all subsequent classifiers had been so careful. Theophrastus was a friend and successor to Aristotle. Pavord is critical of many authors, and of the way their books look to us now. There is a history of plant illustration within these pages. Pliny had been against illustrations of plants in books, because they would have been copied badly; pictures were also difficult to integrate within the original system of scrolls. The eventual woodcuts did not have to be crude, with many reproduced here showing swirling masses of plants or delicate leaves in fine detail. The final engravings that became included in plant books could show enough useful detail to be excellent field guides, although for centuries authors relied on previous works of folklore. The famous but flawed _Herball_ (1597) of John Gerard ("a plagiarist and a crook") showed a realistic picture of a barnacle tree (denominated _Britannica concha anatifera_), the tree that was said to produce barnacle geese. Pavord's book is big, and is lavishly illustrated, with a third of the pages being taken up with illustrations (most in color) nicely keyed to her text.
Along with Theophrastus, Pavord's highest praise goes to Englishman John Ray, who in 1696 coined the term "botany". He provided six rules by which to categorize plants, not only the ones familiar to him in England, but the spectacular finds being brought from distant lands. Others had previously insisted on classifying plants by use, which was entirely artificial, or more helpfully by leaf or seed form, but it was Ray who put botany on its first real foundation by noting the distinction of seeds that sprout with one leaf or two (we still classify monocotyledon and dicotyledon). He had made scientific order ascendant in his field. He knew he was part of an ongoing process, predicting that future botanists would look back and "our proudest discoveries will seem slight, obvious, almost worthless." He might have been right, but seen as a tribute to their efforts, _The Naming of Names_ shows how these discoveries, achieved over the centuries by curious, devoted, and fallible plantsmen, have brought us to our current understandings. Pavord's book essentially ends with Ray, barely mentioning the recent advances that have been made with DNA testing; such tests have confirmed much of what was eventually realized as the evolutionary tree, but have upset other parts as well. It has been a long botanical trip, and Pavord's deep scholarship and inclusion of gorgeous illustrations make the journey enormous fun.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Thorough Review of the Roots of Taxonomy, November 9, 2006
This review is from: The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants (Hardcover)
This book may be more than the casual reader bargained for. As noted in the prior excellent and very thorough review, this book focuses on pre-Linnean taxonomy. The writing is not sprightly, but if you are seriously interested in this topic, you will find as much pleasure in this book as I did. The illustrations are plentiful and often beautiful, and are as much a part of the story as the taxonomy.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Book!, February 9, 2008
Great book! Amazing illustrations.
The author is very good at telling a long history of over 2000 years on how a standard taxonomy was created for all plants and living things.
For some reason Anna Pavord likes to divide all the historical characters in "good guys" and "bad guys". May be it is true, but sometime reading the book I have the impression of watching an Hollywood movie. But don't worry, as in every respectable Hollywood film, the good guys at the end will prevail.
The battle to establish a set of universal conventions to name plats is not yet over! For example take a look at Wikipedia (the English version) and you will see that the scientific notation is not used as a standard way to name plants. For reason I completely ignore many Americans still prefer the ambiguous local notation over the scientific one (not surprising, they still discussing about creationism...).
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