Linnaeus’ Species Plantarum 1753, the Ray Society’s Facsimile, volume 1: Ray Society volume 177

The First Edition of Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum 1753 is the accepted starting point for botanical nomenclature and is an important reference work for systematic botanists as well as a seminal work in the history of biology. Because original copies of Species Plantarum are rare and costly the Ray Society published a facsimile edition in two volumes in 1957 and 1959. The Ray Society has decided to reprint its facsimile edition to allow this work to continue to be readily available. The value of the original Ray Society facsimile was enhanced by the addition to the first volume of a definitive essay by W. T. Stearn giving an extensive historical and bibliographic introduction to the work and an appendix in the second volume containing an explanation of Linnaeus’s abbreviations by J. L. Heller together with notes by W. T. Stearn on the illustrations, supplementary works together with an index to species and genera. This reprinted edition has an additional supplementary essay by the Linnaean scholar C.E.Jarvis to update and add to the original essay and the appendix by incorporating new published data, both printed and electronic and to take into account changes in the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature.