Aristotle divided organisms into two types: plants and animals. He developed a systematic classification system that identified different kinds of plants and animals. Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle and Plato, developed the first classification system for plants, later known as the plant kingdom.
Albertus Magnus was an advocate for the collaboration of science and religion. His system of classification divided dicots and monocots. Monocots are flowers that exhibit one single cotyledon, a part of the embryo in a plant seed, and dicots possess two cotyledons.
Otto Brunfels, a German botanist, publicized his own descriptions of plants and the characteristics that made each plant organism unique.
Jérôme Bock, German botanist and Lutheran priest, classified 700 plants according to their medicinal purposes. He also published a manuscript that described the appearances of plants.
Italian botanist Andrea Cesalpino categorized plants according to their differences in internal structure or organs.
In the 17th century, Swiss botanist Caspar Bauhin coined the terms genus and species, which were later explored in detail by Carl Linnaeus. Bauhin also created what appeared to be two-part names, which elicited Linnaeus's idea of binomial nomenclature to describe specific species. Bauhin was first to coin "species" as a classification of scientific taxonomy.
Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist Carl Linnaeus was the most revered botanist of his time. He simplified the classification system by imparting a two-part naming system, called binomial nomenclature, to make identification easier. Binomial nomenclature identifies plants by male and female organs. His system included 24 types of plants.
Michel Adanson, a French naturalist, classed plants according to the individual workings of an organ. Plants with similar organs were grouped together in a division. His work was carried forward by other taxonomists.
Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, a French botanist from Geneva, coined the word "taxonomy," and categorized each species according to ecology, evolution and bio-geography. This gave a comprehensive view of the origins of the seed varieties among plant life.
The first books on botany, "A Synopsis of British Flora, Arranged According to the Natural Order" and "An Introduction to the Natural System of Botany," were published by John Lindley.
Adolphe-Théodore Brongniart explored fossilized plants, and is known as the Father of Paleobotany.
George Bentham, a gifted botanist from Portsmouth, England, performed extensive exploration in Hong Kong and China. His published work, "Genera Plantarum," included a vast list of flora he discovered.
Two Polish botanists, Heinrich Gustav Adolf Engler and Karl Anton Eugen, created the phylum classification of taxonomy. They arranged flowers based on form and structure.
The "Bessey system," named after Ohio-born botanist Charles E. Bessey, explores the evolution of organisms that formed entire new species of life. This discovery entailed 146 families.
J. Hutchinson, a botanist from Northumberland, England, utilized the "Hutchinson system," which traces the origins of organisms that evolved into the diversity of life we see today. This process is called phylogeny. His system included 328 families.
Armen Leonovich, Russian botanist, narrowed the taxonomic process of identification to just divisions or phylums with subclasses underneath. His system focuses less on orders and families.