Standing Tall. Sarracenia leucophylla, White Pitcher Plant, Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
In his book on the plants of Louisiana (1817), that remarkable and versatile naturalist, linguist, anthropologist and archaeologist, Turkish-born Frenchman Constantine Samuel Raffinesque (1783-1840) castigated Claude César Robin (1750-1794). Robin had been a chaplain to the French forces commanded by Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Rochambeau, comte de Vimeur, who fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War. He was also interested in botany, but very much an amateur, prone to mistakes. Thus Raffinesque points out how he misidentified our plant.
Sarracenia leucophylla hails from Louisiana, and that's where Raffinesque encountered it. Sarracenia is named for Michel Sarrazan (1659-1734), a French physician and naturalist who worked in Quebec. He sent back to the King's Botanical Garden in Paris the first North American Sarracenia (purpurea) known to Europe and he remarked how this Pitcher plant is carnivorous. Contemporary botanists would have nothing of this confusion between plants and animals. It wasn't until Charles Darwin wrote about carnivorous plants in 1875, that Sarrazan was put in the right.
Interestingly, too, Raffinesque already put forward a precursor to Darwin's theory on evolution around 1833. Darwin acknowledged this in later editions of The Origin of Species (1859). But Raffinesque missed out on the central mechanism of Darwinian evolution, natural selection, first developed by Wallace and Darwin.
Raffinesque had also observed that Pitcher Plants serve as animal traps, but how that process more specifically works had to wait for Darwin's study.
Standing Tall. Sarracenia leucophylla, White Pitcher Plant, Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
In his book on the plants of Louisiana (1817), that remarkable and versatile naturalist, linguist, anthropologist and archaeologist, Turkish-born Frenchman Constantine Samuel Raffinesque (1783-1840) castigated Claude César Robin (1750-1794). Robin had been a chaplain to the French forces commanded by Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Rochambeau, comte de Vimeur, who fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War. He was also interested in botany, but very much an amateur, prone to mistakes. Thus Raffinesque points out how he misidentified our plant.
Sarracenia leucophylla hails from Louisiana, and that's where Raffinesque encountered it. Sarracenia is named for Michel Sarrazan (1659-1734), a French physician and naturalist who worked in Quebec. He sent back to the King's Botanical Garden in Paris the first North American Sarracenia (purpurea) known to Europe and he remarked how this Pitcher plant is carnivorous. Contemporary botanists would have nothing of this confusion between plants and animals. It wasn't until Charles Darwin wrote about carnivorous plants in 1875, that Sarrazan was put in the right.
Interestingly, too, Raffinesque already put forward a precursor to Darwin's theory on evolution around 1833. Darwin acknowledged this in later editions of The Origin of Species (1859). But Raffinesque missed out on the central mechanism of Darwinian evolution, natural selection, first developed by Wallace and Darwin.
Raffinesque had also observed that Pitcher Plants serve as animal traps, but how that process more specifically works had to wait for Darwin's study.