On Sun, 2 Feb 2003 22:17:04 +0000, Stewart Robert Hinsley
wrote:

In article , P van Rijckevorsel
writes
I am quite dubious if the large majority of people believe that Linnaeus is
the beginning of modern taxonomy. You are the first one I meet ;-) Botany
uses 1753 as the starting point of binary nomenclature, another matter
entirely.

No doubt one could accuse the Linnaean Society of bias, but,

http://www.linnean.org/html/history/..._biography.htm

and, they're not the only ones,

http://www.google.com/search?as_q=Li...xonomy&num=100

and some of those links are university sites

All accounts of botanical taxonomy start off with Theophrastus, and modern
taxonomy is assumed to start with Caesalpinus (1519-1603) or John Ray
(1628-1705). Binary combinations on a largish scale were first used by de
Tournefort (1656-1708).

Most HS Bio books I have used for my classes use Linnaeus's system as
the beginning of modern taxonomy, and use Aristotle's system as a
comparitive system. Most of them also use the 5 kingdom system.