Biology Department, Texas A&M University, College Station, 77843-3258, USA.
Am J Bot. 2011 Dec;98(12):1911-23. doi: 10.3732/ajb.1100188. Epub 2011 Nov 10.
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.
1689 年 3 月 27 日，英国皇家学会会员兼秘书理查德·沃勒（Richard Waller）在皇家学会的一次会议上向与会的同事们展示了他的“将英文草药表按外部形状和形态排列，以便通过外部形状和形态找到它们的名称”。这些表格是为初学者开发的，采用铅笔和水彩绘制的选定植物及其特征的彩色图像。这些表格的植物水彩画现在是皇家学会网站上 Turning-the-Pages 文档的一部分。然而，在过去的 320 年里，这些杰出植物水彩画创作的科学背景一直不为人知。这些表格是沃勒作为基于图像的二歧分类法开发的，比让·巴普蒂斯特·拉马克（Jean Baptiste Lamarck）在《法国植物志》（1778 年）第一版中编写的基于文本的二歧分类法早了将近 100 年，拉马克通常被认为是二歧分类法的先驱。这些大幅对开页图像是如何排列以说明二歧分类法的尚不清楚，但这里展示了一种基于沃勒描述的排列方式，即单独的层次聚类（表格）的叶序排列。尽管在总共 65 种水彩画植物中，只有 24 种双子叶草本植物被用于这些表格中（其余为单子叶植物），但它们是一种“概念验证”，作为一种基于使用二歧选择辅助识别的方法的模型。
