Index Kewensis

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Title page of the first volume of the Index Kewensis

The index Kewensis is 1893-2002 by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew out given plant directory . It contains the flowering plants described since 1753 , which he lists according to genus and species , a reference to the first publication and their country of origin. The two basic volumes appeared in four issues between 1893 and 1895; afterwards a total of 21 supplements appeared. The full title of the first volume isIndex Kewensis Plantarum Phanerogamarum - Nomina et synonyma omnium generum et specierum a Linnaeo usque ad annum MDCCCLXXXV complectens nomine recepto auctore patria unicuique plantae subjectis.

The index was created on the initiative of Charles Darwin . The first volumes were compiled by the botanist Benjamin Daydon Jackson , the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Joseph Dalton Hooker , had overall responsibility for the project .

history

Joseph Dalton Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, had overall responsibility for the work on the Index Kewensis.
Benjamin Daydon Jackson created the first volumes of the Index Kewensis.

The British naturalist Charles Darwin , who was intensively involved in botanical studies towards the end of his life, repeatedly had difficulties with the taxonomic classification of plants. Not all of the plants he studied could be clearly classified taxonomically using the nomenclature of the Species Plantarum published by Carl von Linné in 1753 . He then made the decision to support the creation of a comprehensive work that should list all known flowering plants with their genus and species names and their country of origin. He was modeled on the Nomenclator botanicus published by Ernst Gottlieb von Steudel between 1821 and 1824 , in which the names and synonyms of all plant species and genera were listed in alphabetical order.

For several years Darwin had repeatedly auditioned for this project with the board of directors of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in the hope of getting funding for this project from the government or other agencies. However, since he was not promised any support, he finally decided to finance the project from his own resources.

Darwin informed the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Joseph Dalton Hooker , of his decision to finance such a work himself , and commissioned him to plan the project and its implementation in detail with the support of George Bentham and other employees of the botanical garden. Hooker also received advice from the American botanist Asa Gray and the Irish naturalist John Ball . As an editor and author he was able to win Benjamin Daydon Jackson , the secretary of the Linnean Society of London , who appeared to him to be particularly qualified for the task due to his extensive knowledge of botanical literature and had submitted a time and cost plan. The overall responsibility for the project remained in the hands of Hooker.

To ensure funding after his death, Darwin decreed in his will that £ 250 a year should be made available to continue working on the index over a period of five years. Charles Darwin died in April 1882 shortly after Jackson began working on the index.

Work on the first two volumes

The work to be created should list all names of flowering plants published after 1753. 1753 was chosen as the starting time, since Carl von Linné's work Species Plantarum was published in that year , in which all plants were described with binomial names for the first time . This work is considered to be the beginning of modern botanical nomenclature to this day.

Previous attempts to build a comprehensive index had always relied on secondary sources. The Kewensis Index was the first botanical index to list the plant names based on the original publications.

The work Genera Plantarum by George Bentham and Joseph Dalton Hooker served as the basis for listing the plant genera in the index . The generic names listed therein were written with their synonyms on a single sheet of paper. The sheets have been put in alphabetical order.

Then all the species listed in Steudel's Nomenclator Botanicus were included in the new index by listing them on the appropriate genus sheets. The Nomenclator specimen from the Royal Botanic Gardens that was used also contained numerous subsequent additions, as it had been constantly expanded using the institute's own herbarium.

All sheets of a genus were stowed in an envelope labeled with the genus name, which in turn was stored in boxes, similar to a herbarium. Overall, this initial preparatory work, for which Jackson, who was supported at times by several assistants, took 18 months, resulted in more than 30,000 envelopes, which were stored in 178 boxes and together weighed more than a ton.

The plant species contained in various other botanical standard works were then entered into the system that was developed:

After the species from these works had been incorporated, species from smaller Florentine works and publications from magazines were also incorporated. However, it was not possible to fully include all taxonomic publications published since 1753, which later often led to consequential errors in the botanical nomenclature.

The two basic volumes, which were published in four volumes between 1893 and 1895, contained almost 400,000 plant names.

Supplementary volumes

Initially, it was intended to also note in the index whether a given name is the scientifically accepted name or just a synonym, so that the first editions of the Index Kewensis more than just served the function of a nomenclature. However, the editors soon recognized that this project was too ambitious, which is why a taxonomic assessment was dispensed with from the fourth supplementary delivery from 1913.

In the course of time, the two basic volumes were expanded by a total of 21 bound supplementary deliveries, some of which also consisted of several partial volumes. Each supplementary volume covered a publication period of five years. With the increasing number of supplementary volumes, it became more and more difficult for users to find a certain plant species in the index, since in the worst case one had to search through almost 30 bound books with more than 1,000,000 entries. Although several attempts have been made to incorporate the species from all volumes into a single list, such a list never existed. At the University of Utrecht, a complete copy of the Index Kewensis was cut up and all entries were pasted on A4 pages in alphabetical order. The production of this specimen was very labor-intensive, especially since the regularly appearing supplements had to be incorporated, but it made it possible to find a desired plant species in the index much more quickly.

From 1986 the previous editions were digitized with the help of an OCR scan . This version was available to the institute staff of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew and visitors for research.

meaning

The index Kewensis lists the botanical name (genus and species), author and place of publication of the first description as well as the approximate geographical origin of each plant.

The Index Kewensis was initially criticized by various botanists for simply reflecting the Kew view in questions of taxonomic assessment . With the abandonment of the taxonomic claim to distinguish valid main names from synonyms, the international acceptance of the work grew. For a long time, the Index Kewensis was an indispensable reference work for botanists in the preparation of botanical monographs or botanical inventories of all plants in a certain area ( floras ) and generally for plant taxonomic processing.

In 2000 the International Plant Names Index (IPNI) was published. In this project, the data from the Index Kewensis, the Gray Herbarium Card Index from Harvard University and the Australian Plant Name Index from the Center for Plant Biodiversity Research in Canberra were combined and made available online.

expenditure

Between 1893 and 2002 the Index Kewensis was published in the following volumes:

output notebook processed period Release date editor Remarks
Volume 1 Booklet 1 1753-1885 September 6, 1893 Benjamin Daydon Jackson Contents: Aa - Dendrobium exiguum
Issue 2 1753-1885 December 14, 1893 BD Jackson Contents: Dendrobium exsculptum - Justicia
Volume 2 Booklet 1 1753-1885 October 27, 1894 BD Jackson Contents: Kablikia - Psidium galapagaeum
Issue 2 1753-1885 October 19, 1895 BD Jackson Contents: Psidium gardnerianum - Zyzygium
Supplement 1 Booklet 1 1886-1895 January - February 1902 BD Jackson, Théophile Alexis Durand (* 1855 - † 1912)
Issue 2 1886-1895 December 1, 1902 BD Jackson, TA Durand
Issue 3 1886-1895 November 20, 1903 BD Jackson, TA Durand
Issue 4 1886-1895 July 1906 BD Jackson, TA Durand
Supplement 2 Booklet 1 1896-1900 October 26, 1904 Stephen Troyte Dunn (1868 - 1938), William Turner Thiselton-Dyer
Issue 2 1896-1900 July 20, 1905 ST Dunn
Supplement 3 1901-1905 May 20, 1908 ST Dunn Last edition in the form of a nomenclator. Last application of the "Kew Rule".
Supplement 4 1906-1910 November 13, 1913 Thomas Archibald Sprague (* 1877; † 1958) First supplementary volume without taxonomic evaluations; for the first time there is also an indication of the date of the first publication.
Supplement 5 1911-1915 September 8, 1921 TA Sprague New genres are summarized for the first time under families at the end of the volume.
Supplement 6 1916-1920 May 20, 1926 TA Sprague
Supplement 7 1921-1925 September 26, 1929 TA Sprague, Mary Letitia Green (* 1886; † 1978) Genera are grouped into families (after K. von Dalla Torre & H. Harms ).
Supplement 8 1926-1930 November 2, 1933 TA Sprague, ML Green
Supplement 9 1931-1935 December 22, 1938 TA Sprague, ML Green, Mabel Irene 'Veronica' Skan (* 1902 - † 1982), Sabine Wilson († 1959) For the first time in new combinations, the author of the basionym is mentioned in brackets, hybrids are marked, but the parent species are not given.
Supplement 10 1935-1940 August 21, 1947 ML Sprague, MI Skan, S. Wilson Descriptions with illustration are for the first time marked with an asterisk.
Supplement 11 1941-1950 September 24, 1953 MI Skan, S. Wilson
Supplement 12 1951-1955 April 30, 1958 MI Skan The copyright for the Index Kewensis is transferred to the Bentham-Moxon-Trust from this supplementary volume.
Supplement 13 1956-1960 April 28, 1966 MI Skan, Janet Eileen Hawkins (* 1931) Last delivery with Latin abbreviations for geographical names and explanatory notes.
Supplement 14 1961-1965 19th February 1970 MI Skan, Jean Lesley Mary Pinner (1932 - 1982), Thalia Adele Bence (1938 - 1983) The genera are grouped into families according to the system used in Kew Gardens (based on Bentham & Hooker ).
Supplement 15 1966-1970 May 2nd 1974 MI Skan, JLM Pinner, TA Bence Journal years are no longer given in Roman numerals. Illustrations in the publications are no longer marked with asterisks.
Supplement 16 1971-1975 October 8, 1981 JLM Pinner, TA Bence For the first time, all taxonomic ranks from the family down are given (previously only genus and species were mentioned); for hybrids the parents are given with genus and species names. Corrective new entries are marked with a cross.
OCR scan 1971-1975 1983 JLM Pinner, TA Bence The two basic volumes and the first 16 supplements are digitized using an OCR scan.
Supplement 17 1976-1980 June 25, 1987 JLM Pinner, TA Bence, Rosemary Anne Davies (* 1952) The authorship is only given for newly added genres.
Supplement 18 1981-1985 June 25, 1987 JLM Pinner, TA Bence, RA Davies, Katherine May Lloyd (* 1961)
Supplement 19 1986-1990 October 10, 1991 RA Davies, KM Lloyd The copyright for the Index Kewensis is transferred to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from this supplementary volume.
CD edition 1986 – October 1992 1993 RA Davies, KM Lloyd The first publication of the Index Kewensis on CD-ROM, containing data up to the end of October 1992.
Supplement 20 1991-1996 January 24, 1997 Davies RA, KM Challis The names of the families are used based on Richard Kenneth Brummitt . The names of the authors are given according to RKBrummitt and CEPowell. Country names are used based on S.Hollis & RKBrummitt. In addition to species and hybrids, types are also listed from this supplementary delivery.
CD-ROM 1991 – July 1996 1997 Davies RA, KM Challis Second publication on CD-ROM.
1991-1996 2000 Davies RA, KM Challis Start of the International Plant Names Index (IPNI) , an online project of the Index Kewensis (The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), the Gray Herbarium Card Index (Harvard University) and the Australian Plant Name Index (Center for Plant Biodiversity Research, Canberra) .
Supplement 21 1996-2000 August 20, 2002 Davies RA, KM Challis

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Benjamin Dayton Jackson: The new 'Index of Plant-Names'. (Concluded from p. 71) In: The Botanical Journal - British and Foreign. Vol. XXV. West, Newman & Co., London 1887, pp. 150-151
  2. ^ A b c d Benjamin Dayton Jackson: The new 'Index of Plant-Names'. In: The Botanical Journal - British and Foreign. Vol. XXV. West, Newman & Co., London 1887, pp. 66-71
  3. ^ A b c Frans A. Stafleu: Review: The Index Kewensis. In: Taxon. 15 (7) September 1966, pp. 270-274
  4. ↑ George Bentham, Joseph Dalton Hooker: Genera plantarum ad exemplaria imprimis in herbariis Kewensibus servata definita. 1862–1883, 3 volumes
  5. ^ Ernst Gottlieb von Steudel: Nomenclator botanicus; enumerans ordine alphabetico nomina atque synonyma tum generica tum specifica et a Linnaeo et recentrioribus de re botanica scriptoribus plantis phanerogamis imposita. 1821–1824, 3 volumes
  6. ↑ a b c About the Index Kewensis. on the homepage of the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), accessed on April 5, 2016
  7. ↑ a b c Eimear Nic Lughadha: Towards a working list of all known plant species. In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 359, 2004, pp. 681-687, doi : 10.1098 / rstb.2003.1446
  8. ↑ a b Index Kewensis chronology. on the homepage of the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), accessed on April 5, 2016
  9. ↑ About IPNI. on the homepage of the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), accessed on April 5, 2016
  10. ↑ Richard Kenneth Brummitt: Vascular plant families and genera. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1992, ISBN 0-947643-43-5
  11. ^ Richard Kenneth Brummitt, CE Powell: Authors of plant names. A list of authors of scientific names of plants, with recommended standard forms of their names, including abbreviations. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 1992, ISBN 0-947643-44-3 .
  12. ^ S. Hollis, Richard Kenneth Brummitt: World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distribution. 1992.