Species

The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a crucial period in the historical development of the "species" concept. It is impossible to give an accurate account of this concept in its biological use apart from its origin and development in the context of attempts to construct a classification of living things. Classifications of living things prior to this period were largely utilitarian in character. The De materia medica of the first century physician Dioscorides, for example, which was the basis for numerous medieval herbals, classified herbs according to their supposed medicinal value. In his Historia animalium of 1551, Conrad Gesner (1516-1565) simply arranged animals in alphabetical order according to the common Latin name of each. In neither case was any attempt made to develop a rigorous system of biological classification. A desire to accurately identify the organisms mentioned in the classical writings of antiquity, as well as a desire to bring order to the mass of novel organisms introduced by the voyages of discovery, led Renaissance naturalists to devise new approaches to classification. Critical discussions of the nature of "species" arose from attempts to construct a "natural" classification of living things.