Plant Science 156 (2000) 121 – 122
Book review
www.elsevier.com/locate/plantsci
Plant Systematics. Edited by Gurcharan Singh, Science Publishers, Inc., Enfield, USA, pp. 250. ISBN 1578080770; US$26.00
A systematic classification of the plant king-dom is certainly among the oldest attempts of man to understand his environment. Today’s plant systematics and taxonomy have not much in common with those early attempts, except for the complexity of the task and the need to de-vise a framework that allows to classify all known plants, taking into account all available information about these plants, and is flexible enough to accommodate future findings.
The objective of the present book is to present an overview over this discipline and its principles and techniques, past and present. The 250 pages are divided into 11 chapters treating issues rang-ing from the historical background, botanical nomenclature, methodological aspects, hierarchi-cal classification, over the phylogeny of an-giosperms, the major systems of classification, taxonomic evidence, to variation and speciation, and, finally, taxonomy on the web. The text is accompanied by pictures, mostly of the key figures that have marked the development of this discipline, and diagrams and tables illustrating the structures and results (phylogenetic trees etc.) of the different classification systems. The size of the book and the typefont make for easy reading but the print quality of the pictures and figures leaves ample room for improvement. Much of the cited literature is in German, some in French, and most of these citations contain ty-pographical errors — a book devoted to prob-lems of nomenclature should pay particular attention to the orthographic specificities of the different languages.
When reading the book, it becomes obvious to which high degree the discipline is marked by its historical roots, and that establishing and main-taining a unified system and nomenclature has been, and still is, among the most important challenges in systematics. The author succeeds well to convey this impression and gives full ac-count of the historical development and ‘admin-istrative’ problems. Once the reader has worked through the book, he has become familiar with the great number of relevant approaches that have been developed over the centuries, their merits and demerits, and with the fundamental methodological principles (sampling of specimen, their live and desiccated conservation, analysis of their relevant characteristics).
For the novice, it is at times not easy to ex-tract from this wealth of information the points of greatest relevance for today, and the methods and techniques which are to be privileged for a modern approach to plant systematics. Analyti-cal techniques yielding molecular data are dealt with on only a few pages. One single page is dedicated to nucleic-acid based approaches — approximately the same space is dedicated to the description of labels to be used for herbarium specimen. Computer-based keys and the key sys-tems based on different kinds of punched file cards occupy similar spaces. A careful interpreta-tion of the past and present main currents would have been helpful for the reader in order to clas-sify the offered information in hierarchy of im-portance. Finally, 11 pages, organized into 19 points with up to 22 sub-points, are devoted to the description of selected internet sites related to plant taxonomy. Unfortunately, only one of the descriptions comprises the electronic address. In summary, this book is helpful for those
Book re6iew
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who wish to become acquainted with the com-plexity of plant systematics and its evolution throughout history. To those who intentd to be-come actively engaged in this field, it could provide a basis for continued reading of more practically oriented literature.
Gu¨nther Hahne
Institut de Biologie Mole´culaire des Plantes,
CNRS, 12, rue du Ge´ne´ral Zimmer, 67084 Strasbourg Cedex,
France
E-mail: gunther.hahne@ibmp-ulp.u-strasbg.fr
