Marsili Luigi Ferdinando (Bologna 1658– 1730) és a növények, gombák

Marsigli’s interest also extended to plants, as evidenced by his published scientific works and unpublished manuscripts, as well as by the museum he set up with the material he collected. For his observations, he used a microscope, meteorological measuring instruments and inventive tools of his own design. His attention focused both on crops and on vegetation, which is part of the system that forms the basic unit of the landscape in its relationship and interaction with the other constituent elements (man, soil, fauna, etc.). Marsili already recognised the spatial and temporal dynamism of vegetation along the Danube, the sequence of adjacent but different biotic communities. His method also incorporates historical and cultural aspects, which can also be expressed through cartography. In his partially bilingual study on coffee and its consumption, and in his great monograph on the Danube, he was assisted by the Bolognese botanist Professor Trionfetti Lelio in the precise botanical classification of the plants that form “floating islands” in some European lakes and the zonally distributed sublittoral vegetation. He wanted to clarify the origin of cryptogamous organisms, one of the main topics of the scientific interest of his era. In this connection, Marsili deals with fungi, mosses and lichens in a richly illustrated study and an even richer collection in manuscript form. Contradicting his Bolognese mentor, the famous Marcello Malpighi, he adopts the Aristotelian theory of spontaneous generation, in contrast to the theory of the reproduction of cryptogamous organisms, including fungi by spores. His contemporary Micheli Pietro Antonio dedicated the genus Marsilea, liverwort (1729) to him in recognition of his scientific merits. Linné retained the name but gave it to the water fern, Marsilea quadrifolia (1753).