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This update of my classification of the flowering plants, or Angiospermae, is based upon about 800 pertinent books, monographs, and other botanical papers published since my last synopsis appeared in the Nordic Journal of Science in 1983. Also I have narrowed my family-and ordinal-gap concepts to bring acceptance of family and ordinal limits more in line with those of current taxonomists. This new information and the shift in my phylogenetic philosophy have caused significant changes in my interpretation of relationships and numbers and content of taxa. Also the ending "-anae" has been accepted for superorders in place in the traditional but inappropriate" -iflorae." A new phyletic "shrub" replaces earlier versions, and attempts to indicate relationships among the superorders, orders, and suborders. One table includes a statistical summary of flowering-plant taxa: ca. 235,000 species of 12,615 genera, 440 families, and 711 subfamilies and undivided families in 28 superorders, 70 orders, and 7 5 suborders of Angiospermae. Three other tables summarize the indigenous distribution of the families and subfamilies of Angiospermae about the world.

INTRODUCTIONThe classification of the class Angiospermae ptesented here is the culmination of more than 15 years effort to express as accurately as present knowledge permits the phylogenetic relationships among the higher taxa of flowering plants. In the course of 30 years of floristic and other phytogeographic studies, considerable botanical collecting and observation on all the continents, and visits to many of the world's major botanical gardens, I have had the good fortune to collect or observe in living condition representatives of all but 44 of the 312 families accepted here. I have studied preserved or dried herbarium materials of representatives of the 44 missed families, mostly monogeneric taxa of Africa and South America. In more than 10 years of library research I have gleaned from numerous publications data relevant to a better understanding of the relationships, origins, and classification of the angiosperms. Particularly helpful have been reports of original research on vegetative anatomy, floral morphology, palynology, embryology, phytochemistry, cytology, phytogeography, and paleobotany. Many of these publications are too recent to have been available to the earlier phylogenists.Feeling strongly that new systems of classification should be published only with accompanying thorough documentation and explanation, I have resisted until now the many requests to publish my system.

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