Systematic Botany ‐ an Unending Synthesis

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Taxon.In addressing the seventh annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America, Benjamin Lincoln Robinson stated: "An accurate, lucid and complete classification of plants is... the only secure basis upon which botany as a whole can rest. What is the present strength of this all-important foundation? Is it built upon rational principles? Should we build on or tear down and reconstruct? Is it nearing completion or does it represent as yet only the earliest stages of the desired structure?" (1901, p. 2). These questions, although we might now word them a little differently, seem as germane today as they were sixty-three years ago. I. THE CONTINUING NEED Taxonomy is a lonely voice speaking on behalf of an interest in diversity in biology,where all other forces seem to be emphasizing the common denominators. In the United States, at least, the submergence of botany, bacteriology, and zoology into a broadly defined but narrowly oriented biology is going on at an increasing tempo, with a resulting stress on those features that are common to all or most organisms, and a deliberdte setting aside as of only secondary if any importance the so-called "details" of multicellular organisms. Some extremists would tell us that Darwinian evolution is regarded as "proven" and no longer of central interest to biology. Organisms are viewed merely as relatively uninteresting containers within which interesting physico-chemical processes are taking place, and only the latter are deemed worthy of serious study. In short, this trend toward "reductionism" has gone to such ridiculous extremes that we are probably about to witness the swing of the pendulum of interest in some other and as yet unperceived direction.Taxonomy, the first aspect of plant science to be pursued, has been traditionally associated with exploration in the field coupled with cultivation in the garden and study in the herbarium and library. Many otherwise informed persons assume that the exploratory phase of botany is essentially complete; this assumption is, of course, an entirely erroneous one. Keck (1959, p. 77) has recently estimated that "we shall not be through with our inventory in fifty years... my hunch is that we shall know the temperate floras of the world rather thoroughly in another 30 or 40 years, and that it will be at least twice as long before we can begin to think we know the tropical * Summation lecture of a symposium on the Broadening Basis of Classification, under the auspices of the Systematic Section at the Xth International Botanical Congress at Edinburgh, 7 August 1964. The writer is g...

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