Nomenclator botanicus seu synonymia plantarum universalis, enumerans ordine alphabetico nomina atque synonyma, tum generica tum specifica.

J. G. Cottae

Stuttgart, Germany Tübingen, [Germany]

1840-1841

Bib record

Part 1. Lit. A-K.
Editio secunda ex novo elaborate et Aucta.

https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/655#/summary

https://archive.org/details/mobot31753000788452/page/n1

Ernst Gottlieb von Steudel, physician and botanist, was born in the German state of Wⁿrttemberg in 1783. He was educated at Tⁿbingen University, and received a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1805. He then began medical practice in the town of Esslingen, and remained there for the remainder of his life. Steudel's career as a physician was impressive and, in 1826, he became the chief state physician in what had become the Kingdom of Wⁿrttemberg. At the Jubilee celebration of his fiftieth year as a Doctor of Medicine, he was made a Knight of the Royal Order for civil servants, and his many services to the community were recognized by the Natural History Academy, of which he was a member, and the Town Council. In addition, the University of Tⁿbingen presented him with a new diploma in which he was named Doctor of Surgery.
During all of these years of public service, Steudel was also occupied with botany. In 1825, he founded, with Christian Ferdinand Hochstetter (1787-1860), a professor at the teacher's college in Esslingen, an organization known as the Wⁿrttembergischer botanische Reiseverein. The purpose of this society was to send young botanists out into the world to discover and collect plants in all of their varieties thus promoting and expanding botanical studies and herbaria throughout the Kingdom and beyond. Hochstetter himself traveled to Portugal, Madeira, and the Azores, and Steudel was able to create a herbarium of over 20,000 species.
Steudel and Hochstetter were the co-authors of Enumeratio plantarum Germaniae, 1826, but of greater importance was the former's Synopsis planterum glumacearum, 2 vols. (1853-1855). The first volume was devoted to the Poaceae family, and the second to the Cyperaceae and affiliated familes. Steudel's other major work, Nomenclator botanicus, 2 volumes (1821-1824), was an alphabetical listing of more than 3300 genera and nearly 40,000 species. Charles Darwin was a great admirer of this publication, and it served as the valued predecessor to Index Kewensis which was initiated in 1882 by Daydon Jackson under the supervision of Joseph Hooker at Kew Garden. Darwin's original idea was to publish a modern version of Nomenclator botanicus, but the final form was based on the Genera Plantarum of Hooker and Bentham. This change in no way detracts from Steudel's initial effort to create a complete index of the genera and species of plants known to botanists.--Botanicus website, October 2019.

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19 Dec 2023