Flora Zeylanica. [The Flora of Ceylon: Being a Description of the Indian plants of the Island of Ceylon].

LINNAEUS, Carl.

Flora Zeylanica. [The Flora of Ceylon: Being a Description of the Indian plants of the Island of Ceylon].

Amsterdam: J. Wetstenium , 1748.

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Carl Linnaeus' Flora Zeylanica

Early edition of this cornerstone in the history of early modern botany and colonial natural history. Octavo, written in Latin, bound in full speckled calf with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments with raised bands, all edges speckled red, illustrated. In very good condition.

Flora Zeylanica (1747) is one of Carl Linnaeus’s earliest botanical monographs, based on the unpublished plant collections of Paul Hermann (1646–1695), a Dutch botanist who gathered specimens in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) during his tenure as a colonial physician. Linnaeus—working from Hermann’s manuscripts and herbarium specimens preserved in Europe—revised, classified, and published them according to his own Linnaean system of taxonomy. The result was the first systematic description of the flora of Sri Lanka, a landmark in tropical botany.