Chapter 1 Introduction
(scientists)
ROMUALDO B. DE GUZMAN, JR., MSA, MBio
Associate Professor V
Module Overview
❑ History of Botany
➢ Pre-17th century
➢ 17th century
➢ 18th century
➢ 19th century
➢ 20th century to present
During the pre-17th century
❖4th Century B.C.E: Both Aristotle and
Theophrastus got involved in identifying
plants and describing them.
❖Because of his contributions, Theophrastus
was hailed as the “Father of botany”
because of his two surviving works on plant
studies.
❖Although Aristotle also wrote about plants,
he received more recognition for his studies
of animals.
During the pre-17th century
❖ In A.D. 60: Dioscorides wrote De Materia
Medica.
❖ This work described a thousand medicines,
most of which came from plants.
❖ For 1500 years, it remained the guidebook
on medicines in the Western world until the
invention of the compound microscope.
Quote: “Medicine sometimes grants health,
sometimes destroys it, showing which plants
are helpful, which do harm.”
During the 17th century
❖Early 17th century: For a brief
period, the search for knowledge in
the field of Botany temporarily
became stagnant.
❖However, the revival of learning
during the
European Renaissance renewed
interest in plants
❖The number of scientific publications
increased.
During the 17th century
❖1640: Johannes van Helmont
measured the uptake of water in
a tree. [Link] explains (refer
to Major Experiments section) “In
what is perhaps his best-known
experiment, van Helmont placed a 5-
pound (about 2.2-kg) willow in an
earthen pot containing 200 pounds
(about 90 kg) of dried soil, and over
a five-year period he added nothing
to the pot but rainwater or distilled
water.
❖After five years, he found that the
tree weighed 169 pounds (about 77
kg), while the soil had lost only 2
ounces (57 grams). He concluded
that “164 pounds of wood, barks, and
roots arose out of water only,” and
he had not even included the weight
of the leaves that fell off every
autumn.”
During the 17th century
❖1665: Robert Hooke invented the
microscope. Because of this, Robert
Hooke had the chance to take a close
look of a cell looks like. His
description of these cells was
published in Micrographia. However,
the cells seen by Hooke showed no
signs of the nucleus and other
organelles found in most living
cells (Rhoads 2007).
❖1674: Anton van Leeuwenhoek saw
a live cell under a microscope. Before
his discovery, the existence of single-
celled organisms were unknown and
initially were met with skepticism
During the 17th century
❖1686: John Ray published his
book, Historia Plantarum. This
became an important step toward
modern taxonomy (Arber 2010).
❖1694: Rudolf
Camerarius established plant
sexuality in his book entitled De Sexu
Plantarum Epistola.
❖There, he stated that: “No ovules of
plants could ever develop into seeds
from the female style and ovary
without first being prepared by the
pollen from the stamens, the male
sexual organs of the plant“.
During the 18th century
❖1727: Stephen Hales successfully
established plant physiology as a
science.
❖He published his experiments dealing
with the nutrition and respiration of
plants in his publication
entitled Vegetable Staticks.
❖He developed techniques to measure
area, mass, volume, temperature,
pressure, and even gravity in plants.
During the 18th century
❖ 1758: Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linne),
the “Father of Taxonomy“, introduced the
science of taxonomy which deals with the
identification, nomenclature, description
and classification of organisms (species).
His classification is based on the fact that
species was the smallest unit and each
species (taxon) is under a higher category
(Farabee 2001).
❖ 1760s: Botany became even more
widespread among educated women who
painted plants, attended classes on plant
classification, and collected herbarium
specimens. However, their study focused
on the healing properties of plants rather
than plant reproduction. Women began
publishing on botanical topics, and
children’s books on botany
appeared (Mason 2016).
Later part of the eighteenth century:
The prize resulting from the period of
exploration was accumulated in gardens and
herbaria. And the task of systematically
cataloging them was left to the taxonomists.
❖ Joseph Priestley laid the foundation for the
chemical analysis of
plant metabolism. Joseph Priestley
published his works as Experiments and
Observations on Different Kinds of
Air in 1774.
❖ The published paper demonstrated that
green plants absorb “fixed air” (carbon
dioxide) from the atmosphere, give off “gas”
or “dephlogisticated air”, which is now
known as oxygen, and that this gas is
essential to animal life (Rook 1964).
During the 19th Century
❖Early part of the nineteenth
century: Progress in the study of
plant fossils was made.
❖1818: Chlorophyll was discovered.
❖1840: Advances were made in the
study of plant diseases because of
the potato blight that killed potato
crops in Ireland. This led to the
further study of plant
diseases (Richman 2016).
❖1847: The process of
photosynthesis was first elucidated
by Mayer. However, the exact and
detailed mechanism remained a
mystery until the 1862.
❖1859: Charles Darwin proposed his
theory of evolution and adaptation, or
more commonly referred to as
“survival of the fittest” ([Link]
2016).
During the 19th Century
❖Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
collaborated. Darwin soon published his
renowned and highly recognized book On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
❖Around the same time, Gregor Mendel was
performing experiments on the inheritance
among pea plants.
❖Gregor Mendel became the “Father of Genetics”.
❖1862: The exact mechanism of photosynthesis
was discovered when it was observed that starch
was formed in green cells only in the presence of
light.
❖1865: The results of Mendel’s experiments in
1865 showed that both parents should pass
distinct physical factors which code information
to their offspring at conception. The offspring
then inherits one unit for each trait from each of
his parents (Richman 2016)
References
❑ Arber, Agnes. “THE EARLY HISTORY OF
BOTANY.” Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution,
2010: 1-2.
❑ Farabee, M. Development of the Evolutionary
Theory. 2001. [Link]
faculty/farabee/biobk/[Link] (accesse
d July 22, 2016).
❑ JRank Articles. e: Botany – History of botany –
Plants, Plant, Study, and
❑ Century. 2016.
[Link]
(accessed July 24, 2016).
References
❑ [Link]. History of Genetics. 2016.
[Link]
history_genetics.html (accessed July 22, 2016).
❑ Kumar, Punam. Introduction to botany. 2016.
[Link]
.html (accessed July 23, 2016).
❑ Mason, M.G. Introduction to Botany. 2016.
[Link]
(accessed July 23, 2016).
❑ Rhoads, Dan. History of Cell Biology. 2007.
[Link]
(accessed July 22, 2016).
References
❑ Richman, Vita. History of botany. 2016.
[Link]
(accessed July 23, 2016).
❑ ROOK A (ed.). 1964. The Origins and Growth of
Biology. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin
Books, Ltd. 403 p.
SALAMAT PO!