title: Who invented the dichotomous key? Richard Waller's watercolors of the herbs of Britain.
abstract: On 27 March 1689, Richard Waller, Fellow and Secretary of the Royal Society presented his "Tables of the English Herbs reduced to such an order, as to find the name of them by their external figures and shapes" to his assembled colleagues at a meeting of the Royal Society. These tables were developed for the novice by being color images, composed in pencil and watercolor, of selected plants and their distinguishing characteristics. The botanical watercolors for the tables are now a Turning-the-Pages document online on the website of the Royal Society. However, for the past 320 years, the scientific context for the creation of these outstanding botanical watercolors has remained obscure. These tables were developed by Waller as an image-based dichotomous key, pre-dating by almost 100 years the text-based dichotomous keys in the first edition of Flora Française (1778) by Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who is generally given priority for the development of the dichotomous key. How these large folio images were arranged to illustrate a dichotomous key is unknown, but an arrangement based on Waller's description is illustrated here as leaf-ordering for the separate hierarchical clusters (tables). Although only 24 species of watercolored dicot herbs out of a total of 65 in the set of watercolors (the others being monocots) are used in these tables, they are a "proof of concept", serving as models upon which a method is based, that of using a key composed of dichotomous choices for aiding identification.
authors.affiliation: Biology Department, Texas A&M University, College Station, 77843-3258, USA. griffing@tamu.edu
authors.forename: Lawrence R
authors.initials: LR
authors.lastname: Griffing
mesh_terms: D002965:Classification / Q000379:methods*; D035264:Flowers / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D019684:Magnoliopsida / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000145:classification; D018547:Plant Stems / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D010944:Plants / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000145:classification*; D012639:Seeds / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D006113:United Kingdom