Palm Collectors, Palm Botanists, and Species Concepts

Abstract The starting point of modern botanical systematics, the classification of plants, was 1753, the year in which Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) published his Species Plantarum.There he began the practice of using a binomial system to name species and of placing supposedly related species in groups. Linnaeus knew few palms and included only nine species in his work, one of which was a cycad and none of which were from the New World. He at least recognized, however, that palms formed a natural group, the Palmae. Linnaeus’s son Carl (1741-1783) was the first botanist to use the binomial system to describe an Amazon palm. In 1781, he published Mauritia flexuosa.He was also, unwittingly, the first botanist to emphasize the importance of field work in palm systematics. He did not see Mauritiain the field, and described it as having almost no leaves: “Valde singularis haec arbor fere aphylla” (This tree is alone in being nearly leafless) (Linnaeus, 1781). The first botanists actually to collect Amazon palms, at least those from the northern fringe of the region, were Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and Aime Bonpland (1773-1858).* These celebrated naturalists traveled in the New World between 1799 and 1804. They reached San Carlos de Rio Negro in southern Venezuela and investigated the Rio Casiquiare, which links the Orinoco with the Amazon. Humboldt was greatly impressed by palms. Unlike Linnaeus’s son, he saw Mauritia flexuosagrowing in the wild and wrote of the dependence of Indian tribes on it: “The benefits of It is possible that the first botanist to collect Amazon palms may have been Alexandre Ferreira (1756-1815). He traveled extensively in the Amazon region of Brazil between 1783 and 1792, 10 years before Humboldt and Bonpland (Ferreira, 1972; see also Prance, 1971). To be both patriotic and pedantic, however, I should point out that Sir Walter Ralegh collected a fruit of Mauritia flexuosafrom South America and brought it back to England in 1595 (Humboldt, 1850).