Augustus Quirinus Rivinus, also known as August Quirinus Backmann, was a German physician and botanist. He is noted for developing a method of better ways of classifying plants. He classified plants based on the characters of the flower, and introduced the category of order in Introductio generalis in rem herbariam in 1690.
Background
Augustus Quirinus Rivinus was born on December 9, 1652, in Leipzig, Germany. Bachmann was a son of the physician Andreas Bachmann (1600-1656), professor of poetry and then of physiology in the University of Leipzig. The father had already adopted the latinized form of his family name, and the son consistently used it.
Education
Young Rivinus studied humanities and medicine in Leipzig but took his degree at the then flourishing University of Helmstedt in 1676. Augustus Quirinus Rivinus studied in Leipzig and Helmstad, and got his M.D. from the University of Leipzig in 1676.
Career
After taking his medical degree from the University of Helmstedt in 1676, Augustus Quirinus Rivinus settled in his native town as a medical practitioner and became a lecturer in medicine in the University of Leipzig in 1677. He was appointed to the chair of physiology and botany in 1691; became professor of pathology in 1701; and was made professor of therapeutics and dean perpetual in 1719. His last years were clouded by failing vision and urolithiasis, and he died of what was diagnosed as a pleurisy. Rivinus was married four times and had one son, Johannes Augustus Rivinus (1692-1725), who also became a physician.
Rivinus wrote many medical dissertations, among them De dyspepsia (1678), in which he describes the excretory ducts of the sublingual salivary glands. He also tried to remove from the materia medica of his time such squalid substances as feces and urine, as well as all superstitious, counterfeit, or otherwise useless drugs.
Rivinus’ main scientific interest, however, was botany, particularly botanical taxonomy. In 1690 he published Introductio generalis in rem herbariam, with 125 tables of “plants with irregular flowers of one petal” (Labiatae and others). Atlases of “irregular” flowers of four petals (mostly Leguminosae, 121 tables) and of five petals (mostly Umbelliferae, 139 tables) followed in 1691 and in 1699, respectively. Rivinus published these tables at his own expense; and it is therefore no wonder that he could not afford to bring out the last volume he had prepared, which dealt with “irregular” flowers of six petals (orchids). He anticipated Tournefort and Linnaeus in devising an artificial system of plant classification. His system comprised eighteen classes (ordines) based on the number of petals of a flower and on its regularity or irregularity.
Since he emphasized the need for short plant names of no more than two words, Rivinus was a pioneer of modern binomial nomenclature. By the last decade of his life, which was around 1713, Rivinus also obtained a great interest in astronomy.
He died on December 20, 1723 in Leipzig.
Views
Rivinus’ standards of regularity were extremely high. For instance, he included all the Umbelliferae in the class of irregulares penlapetalae because they have not only one style exactly in the center of the flower but also two eccentric ones. His attempt to base classification on a single part of a plant led Rivinus into a controversy with the famous English naturalist John Ray, who held the sound view that the whole plant must be considered.
Membership
In 1720 Rivinus became a member of the Royal Society.
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Because of his interest also in astronomy, by the last decade of his life, Rivinus was nearly completely blind from looking at sunspots.