BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 147 of 150

Correct — C, A P de Condolle — the Swiss botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778–1841), whose surname the booklet prints as 'de Condolle'. In his Théorie élémentaire de la botanique of 1813 he made the presence or absence of vascular tissue the primary division of the entire plant kingdom: Vasculares, plants that possess vascular bundles, which he equated with Cotyledoneae, against Cellulares, plants built of cells alone with no vascular tissue, which he equated with Acotyledoneae. Beneath that split he kept working with structure rather than with flower-counting: within Vasculares he separated Exogenae — the dicotyledons, whose stems thicken by adding new wood outside a cambium — from Endogenae, the monocotyledons, whose scattered bundles make the stem look as though it grows from within; and he ranged the dicot subclasses as Thalamiflorae, Calyciflorae, Corolliflorae and Monochlamydeae. That is the break the question is pointing at. The system then in possession of the field was Linnaeus's sexual system, which sorted plants by counting stamens and pistils — a fast artificial key that shelved wholly unrelated plants side by side. De Candolle argued instead for a natural method founded on the plant's own anatomy, and the same 1813 book coined the word taxonomy for the study of classification itself. He spent the rest of his life applying it in the Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis, begun in 1824 and completed by his son Alphonse in 1873. The chronology then closes the question. Bentham and Hooker's Genera Plantarum came out in three volumes between 1862 and 1883; Engler and Prantl's Die Natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien was issued in parts between 1887 and 1915 — half a century and three-quarters of a century after 1813. Only one worker can be first, which is also why option (d) cannot stand. And de Candolle's division has outlived his system: today's split between vascular plants, the tracheophytes — ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms — and the non-vascular bryophytes is his Vasculares and Cellulares under modern names.

• (a)Engler and Prantl — Adolf Engler (1844–1930) and Karl Prantl (1849–1893) produced Die Natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien in parts between 1887 and 1915 — about seventy-four years after de Candolle. It is also a different kind of system: the first widely adopted phylogenetic one, arranging families by presumed evolutionary advancement from simple to complex, and famously placing monocotyledons before dicotyledons. Its organising idea is evolution, not vascular anatomy.
• (b)Bentham and Hooker — George Bentham (1800–1884) and Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911), working at Kew, published Genera Plantarum in three volumes from 1862 to 1883, classifying some 97,205 species into 202 families and 7,569 genera — the largest and last of the great natural systems, and still the sequence many herbaria shelve by. But it is pre-Darwinian, built on overall floral and morphological affinity, and it appeared half a century after 1813.
• (d)More than one of the above — The stem asks who was first, and a superlative admits exactly one holder. Since de Candolle's 1813 work precedes Bentham and Hooker's 1862–83 and Engler and Prantl's 1887–1915 by decades, no combination of two or more names can satisfy 'first'. BPSC offers this catch-all option freely across the paper, and it is defensible only when two of the choices are independently true.

Systems of plant classification fall into three historical generations, and knowing which generation a name belongs to answers most questions of this type without any further memory. The first is artificial: Carl Linnaeus's sexual system, published in Species Plantarum in 1753, sorted plants on one or two arbitrary characters — the number and arrangement of stamens and pistils. It was quick to use and it gave botany binomial nomenclature, but it scattered relatives and united strangers. The second generation is natural: classification by the total resemblance of the plant, using as many characters as possible, on the assumption that overall affinity is real even if its cause is unknown. A. P. de Candolle's Théorie élémentaire de la botanique (1813) opened this phase and pushed it inward, to anatomy — his top-level cut is presence versus absence of vascular tissue — and Bentham and Hooker's Genera Plantarum (1862–1883) closed it as the most exhaustive natural system ever attempted. The third generation is phylogenetic: after Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) classification was expected to mirror descent, and Engler and Prantl (1887–1915), followed by Hutchinson and by others, arranged families from primitive to advanced. Modern practice has gone one step further again — the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification, first published in 1998 and now in its fourth revision, groups families by DNA sequence data rather than by appearance.

Two independent routes get you to (c), and using both is what makes this a ten-second question. The first is dates. 'First' is a chronological claim, so line the three names up: de Candolle 1813, Bentham and Hooker 1862–1883, Engler and Prantl 1887–1915. Only one of them is early enough to be first at anything in this list, and a candidate who remembers even the century — de Candolle is a contemporary of the Napoleonic wars, the other two are late Victorians — has the answer. The second route is the character named in the stem. Vascular tissue is an internal, anatomical character; it can only be seen by sectioning a stem. Bentham and Hooker classified on floral and gross morphological affinity, and Engler and Prantl on presumed evolutionary advancement, so neither system's organising principle is anatomy at all. The character therefore fingers de Candolle even if you have forgotten every date. The single discriminating fact worth carrying into the hall is the pair of names Vasculares and Cellulares with the year 1813 attached. Two traps sit in the way. One is the misprint: the booklet writes 'A P de Condolle', and a candidate who is sure the name is spelt de Candolle may talk himself out of the right option. The other is option (d), which is tempting only if you think of the question as 'who used vascular characters' — many later workers did — rather than as 'who used them first', which is what it says.

• A. P. de Candolle's Théorie élémentaire de la botanique (1813) divided plants into Vasculares (= Cotyledoneae, vascular bundles present) and Cellulares (= Acotyledoneae, no vascular tissue). The same book coined the word 'taxonomy' and argued for a natural method against Linnaeus's artificial sexual system.
• Within Vasculares, de Candolle recognised Exogenae — the dicotyledons, subdivided into Thalamiflorae, Calyciflorae, Corolliflorae and Monochlamydeae — and Endogenae, the monocotyledons. He worked the scheme out in detail in the Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis, begun in 1824 and finished by his son Alphonse in 1873.
• Bentham and Hooker's Genera Plantarum, three volumes published from 1862 to 1883 at Kew, classified about 97,205 species into 202 families and 7,569 genera. It is a natural, expressly pre-Darwinian system, and it places Gymnospermae between Dicotyledones and Monocotyledones.
• Engler and Prantl's Die Natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien, issued in parts between 1887 and 1915, was the first phylogenetic system to be widely adopted; it ranks families by presumed evolutionary advancement and puts monocotyledons before dicotyledons — the reverse of Bentham and Hooker's order.
• Linnaeus's Species Plantarum (1753) remains the formal starting point of botanical nomenclature and gave science the binomial name, but its sexual system grouped plants merely by the number of stamens and pistils; de Candolle's vascular criterion survives today as the tracheophyte / bryophyte divide.

• Reading past 'first' — several later systems also used vascular characters, which is what makes 'More than one of the above' feel safe, but a superlative can have only one holder
• Being put off by the booklet's spelling 'A P de Condolle' — it is a misprint for Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, and the option is still the right one
• Mixing up the two natural systems: Bentham and Hooker put dicots first and gymnosperms in the middle, while the phylogenetic Engler and Prantl scheme reverses the order and places monocots first

BPSC asks the history of classification as a bare name-and-date recall — who first, who wrote what — and pairs it with a catch-all 'more than one of the above', so a two-column list of system, author and year is exactly the right revision unit. UPSC has not asked a systematist by name in prelims for many years; it now tests the same material functionally, by giving you real plants or real groups and asking you to sort them by structural character, as in the 2021 question on which organisms survive on bare rock and the 2025 pairs of plants with growth habits.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The term 'taxonomy' was first used in which one of the following works ?

  • (a)Species Plantarum (1753) of Carl Linnaeus
  • (b)Théorie élémentaire de la botanique (1813) of A. P. de Candolle
  • (c)Genera Plantarum (1862–83) of Bentham and Hooker
  • (d)Die Natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien (1887–1915) of Engler and Prantl

  Answer(b) Théorie élémentaire de la botanique (1813) of A. P. de Candolle — the same book that divided plants into Vasculares and Cellulares also coined the word 'taxonomy'. Linnaeus's 1753 work gave botany binomial nomenclature, not the term taxonomy.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In Bentham and Hooker's system of classification, Gymnospermae is placed

  • (a)before the Dicotyledons
  • (b)between the Dicotyledons and the Monocotyledons
  • (c)after the Monocotyledons
  • (d)outside the seed plants altogether

  Answer(b) between the Dicotyledons and the Monocotyledons — the Genera Plantarum sequence runs Dicotyledones (Polypetalae, Gamopetalae, Monochlamydeae), then Gymnospermeae, then Monocotyledones. Placing gymnosperms in the middle is one of the most criticised features of the system.