the father of modern taxonomy
LINNAEUS, CARL (Erasmus Darwin, trans.). A System of Vegetables, according to their classes genera orders species with their characters and differences. …
By a botanical society, at Lichfield. Lichfield: John Jackson, for Leigh and Sotheby, London, 1782-1783.
Two volumes. 11 plates in vol. I. Contemporary calf, maroon leather label. Spine lightly worn and darkened, upper joint of first volume cracked but held by cords, else a very good set.
FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH of each volume. This translation of the System Vegetabilium (13th ed.) and of the Supplementum Plantarum was made primarily by Erasmus Darwin. It is dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks, and the preface acknowledges the assistance of “that great Master of the English tongue Dr. Samuel Johnson, for his advice in the formation of the botanic language.” The work leaves the binomial nomenclature in the original Latin, but uses English in the keys and descriptions.
This translation is the work of Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and his Botanical Society at Lichfield, formed in the late 1770s. The grandly named Society had only three members: Darwin, Brooke Boothby, and William Jackson. Erasmus Darwin appears to have been responsible for the translation. In preparing the work he devoted considerable time corresponding with Sir Joseph Banks on botanical matters and with Samuel Johnson on matters of botanical lexicography.
It was through the Systema Vegetabilium that Linnaeus’s work became widely known in England, following this translation from the Latin. In these two volumes and The Families of Plants (1787), “Darwin coined many of the English names of plants that we use today” (George, “Carl Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward: Botanical Poetry and Female Education,” Science & Education).
Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the first volume (see Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, I:7). In a list of books Jefferson requested from London, he wrote: “Whatever of Linnaeus’s works has been translated & published by the Litchfeild [sic] society since the Systema Vegetabilium which I have.”
When the second volume appeared in 1783, the first volume was reprinted with the date 1783. The 1782 Vol. I is sufficiently rare that Soulsby speculated that the British Museum copy was a proof. This set contains the first edition of both parts.
$2,500