Characteres Generum Plantarum. 1st edition

Characteres generum plantarum (complete title , "Characteristics of the types of plants collected, described, and delineated during a voyage to islands of the South Seas, in the years 1772–1775 by Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster") is a 1775/1776 book by Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster about the botanical discoveries they made during the second voyage of James Cook. The book contains 78 plates, the majority of which depict dissections of flowers at natural size. The book introduced 94 binomial names from 75 genera, of which 43 are still the accepted names today. Many plant genera were named after friends or patrons of the Forsters. The book was published in a folio and a quarto edition and translated into German in 1779. It is an important book as the earliest publication of names and descriptions of the native species of New Zealand. Background Johann Reinhold Forster was the main scientific companion travelling with James Cook on his 1772–1775 second voyage. His son Georg Forster accompanied him as draughtsman and assistant. Botanical specimens were collected by Georg and Anders Sparrman, a student of Carl Linnaeus who had been hired as an assistant by Reinhold Forster. After the return to England, was the first scientific publication to come out of the voyage. Reinhold Forster tried to use it to enhance his own reputation as a scientist and to compete with the first voyage's botanist, Joseph Banks. He was uneasy that Banks might already have described and published most of the species names and wanted to be able to claim the discovery of the species he found as his own achievement.