Bibliotheca Botanica

Bibliotheca Botanica ("Bibliography of botany") (Amsterdam, 1736, Salomen Schouten; 2nd edn., 1751) was written by Swedish botanist, physician, zoologist and naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778). The book was written and published in Amsterdam when Linnaeus was twenty-eight and dedicated to the botanist Johannes Burman (1707–1779). The first edition appeared in 1735 with the full title Bibliotheca Botanica recensens libros plus mille de plantis huc usque editos secundum systema auctorum naturale in classes, ordines, genera et species; it was an elaborate classification system for his catalogue of books.

The Preface, dated 8 August 1735, on pages 2–19 contains Linnaeus’s extended account of botanical history in the form of a botanical analogy, in pages 2–3 Linnaeus lists previous bibliographers and then gives his account of botanical history leading to a golden age lasting from 1683 to 1703 (see also Incrementa Botanices, Biuur 1753 and Reformatio Botanices, Reftelius, 1762, for other historical notes by Linnaeus). The Preface mentions that Bibliotheca Botanica was the first part of a planned Bibliotheca medica (which he did not produce).

A digest of Bibliotheca Botanica, which elaborated on the first chapter of the Fundamenta Botanica is given in Aphorisms 5–52 of the Philosophia Botanica.

Linnaean authority Frans Stafleu describes the book as follows:

The term “methodists” (methodici, equivalent to present-day systematists) was coined by Linnaeus in his Bibliotheca Botanica to denote the authors who care about the principles of classification in contrast to the mere collectors who are concerned primarily with the description of plants paying little or no attention to their arrangement into genera etc. For Linnaeus the important early Methodists were Italian physician and botanist Andrea Caesalpino, the English naturalist John Ray, German physician and botanist Augustus Quirinus Rivinus, and a French physician, botanist, and traveller Joseph Pitton de Tournefort.

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