welcome to the homepage of hoefsmid26

• Introduction
• Notes on release 2.1
• Technical assistence
• System requirements
• This is not the book
• Why this text on internet
• Books and sites of interest
• start reading documentation or using the key's

• Introduction

  This is the HTML-version 2.1 of:

  Thonner's analytical key to the families of flowering plants.

  Authors:
             R.Geesink
             A.J.M.Leeuwenberg
             C.E.Ridsdale
             J.F.Veldkamp.

  This book was published in Leiden and Wageningen in 1981
             Leiden (Leiden Botanical series vol.5) and
             PUDOC Wageningen.
             ISBN 90-220-0730-8.

  One of the authors, R. Geesink, died in September 1992.

  Currently this book is available from:
             Backhuys Publishers
             PO BOX 321
             2300 AH Leiden
             The Netherlands
             tel +31-71-5170208
             fax +31-71-5171856
  e-mail backhuys@euronet.nl

  This publisher is specialised in botanical (taxonomical) literature. Visit his catalogue at http://www.euronet.nl./users/backhuys

  There is an official agreement with Backhuys which allows me to publish this HTML-version on the internet.

  Notes on release 2.1

  Links for the conifers are updated. The link to Taxodiaceae is changed to the Cupressaceae.
  

  Family descriptions are visible in full-size window.
  The Leguminosae - (sub)families (Caesalipiniaceae,Papilionaceae and Mimosaceae) are available in the 'index of families'
  

  Some synonyms where shown as failing links.

  in version 2.0

  On a meeting with authors Veldkamp and Ridsdale I received a revision for key's nr 2005 - 2012, and drawings of flower diagrams.
  

  Since in the book key 225 was deleted, key 584a was inserted and in the revised part of the key, entry 2013 had to be deleted too,the key is renumbered.
  

  For easy reference to the original key numbers the old numbers are mentioned in the first lead of the key-entry if appropriate.

  All minor families, tribes or even genera that could be linked to families mentioned on the biodiversity-site are linked to this site, without discussion on taxonomical relevance.

  The drawings in the book are integrated in the glossary.
  In order to accommodate these images a few new entries are added to the glossary (apetalous, choripetalous, sympetalous and amphitropous).

  The larger (overview) plates are on demand and overlay key-text window. In order to continue with the key you should click on the Backward-icon of the Browser.

  The introductional chapters from Thonner's analytical key… are added. Synonyms are present in two tables and third table is added with families present on the biodiversity-site from L. Watson and M. J. Dallwitz but have no reference in this key.

  corrections

  A number of misspelled words were corrected, and some strange entries in the index and glossary are repaired. The following reported errors are corrected:

  Danny Meirte,Royal Museum Central Africa Tervuren (Belgium), noted a "missing link" to the Didieraceae on the delta-cite. This link is now correct.

  Peter Hargreaves found a missing "next" in key-entry 1572a. This omission is corrected, and checked in the rest of the key. The rewritten integrity-script thinks the key is okay now.
  

  Technical assistance

  As at the end of the introduction in Thonner's keys (p. ix) the authors stated:

  We invite the users to point out errors, difficulties and omissions. It should then be indicated in which couplets difficulties arose with a suggestion as to how they might be remedied. A representative specimen would be useful, even if only on loan. Any assistance will be acknowledged in future editions.

  Communication should be sent to:
             J.F. Veldkamp
             PO BOX 9514
             2300 RA Leiden
             e-mail veldkamp@rhbcml.leidenuniv.nl
  
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  System requirements

  Internet access and a browser understanding frames and images. (as all newer releases of Internet Explorer do) There are no 'ALT' or warnings implemented for browsers that don't understand FRAMES or IMAGES. Since the text is a scientific one, no fancy backgrounds or avi's are added.

  This is not the book

  There are a number of differences between this HTML-version and the original book.
  • It is not a handheld textbook
  • In version 1.1 no chapters of the introduction where present. In version 2.0 the book is almost complete.
  • The book gives no description of families, nor does this text. In this HTML-version the families in the family-index are linked to two different web-sites:
    Monocotyledones and Dicotyleledones , are linked to the URL of L. Watson and M. J. Dallwitz
    http://biodiversity.bio.uno.edu/delta/angio/index.htm
    The families of the Gymnospermae are linked to the "Gymnosperm database" of C.J. Earle at http://www.conifers.org

  These HTML-pages were generated by:
             P.Ruijters
             Hoefsmid 26
             5272 RK St. Michielsgestel
             tel +31-73-5530028
             e-mail piet@hoefsmid26.nl
  with permission of authors and publisher
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  Why this text on Internet ?

  As a student in Utrecht I worked at the biological faculty at the institute of "Bijzondere Plantkunde" (taxonomically botanical institute) (1977) on a monograph on the saprophytic genus Voyria (Gentianaceae) with Dr. Paul Maas as supervisor. One of the botanists, Jan Lindeman, used a punch-card flora for Brazil and Suriname. I was attended to the punch-card system of B. Hansen and K. Rahn Determination of Angiosperm families by means of a punched-card system. During that time I also learned to work with Anleitung zum Bestimmen der Familien der Blütenpflanzen, from 1917.

  I wrote a family-determination program based on this Angiosperm punched-card system. At that time my PC was a P2000-computer whith BASIC as programming language and a bad Z80-assembler and data where stored on a small tape cassette. With some help from some friends the ca 70.000 holes where translated in arrays of 1 and 0, and converted to bits. At last the basic-program worked (16 KB internal memory and 9 KB needed by binary data) performed a minimal task in preventing shuffling the punched cards.

  The next computer was a 8086-machine without harddisk, but compilers where small enough to work from floppy disks. The internal memory was 720 KB, a real arena compared to the p2000. The program was rewritten in c and worked fine, until the computer (a Tulip system II) destroyed the last floppy with program code.
  At this moment I still have the binary data but not a working program.
  A few years ago I was very surprised to discover a program based on this punched-card-system at Internet and it is available as windows version 3.0 at http://www.mip.berkeley.edu/meka/meka.html

  I am a regular user of floras and don't like the traditional key where you easily get lost but prefer long keys as in e.g. The flora europaea. At one time I decided to rearrange the key in this long format for own use. I started scanning the text, converted the text to straight asci, undaunted by the huge numbers of misspelt words by the OCR-program. The mistakes should all be corrected by now.

  Since the text has a good structure it was straightforward to write a script in a language like Perl.

  At last the script was ready and the long key format could be typeset with Latex, but the printed key was unreadable.

  Last year I tried to convert the key to HTML-format. This turned out to be an interesting task. I wrote a number of Perl scripts to split the file and to generate the html-tables and indexes out of the keys.

  After all it took so much time that I decided to ask for an official permission to get this text on the Internet so more people could use these HTML-keys.

  Hopefully there will be key-writers and key-hackers to create a public "key to the plant genera" that is useful for people with interest in plant-taxonomy, and scientifically acceptable.

  Although I am a pharmacist my personal interest is mainly in computers and (ethno)pharmacognosy.
  
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  Books and sites of interest

  Books: "Thonner's keys" is not always easy to interpret. This HTML text as well as the original book are not intended as a simple course in neither taxonomy nor morphology

  Terminology is most extensively covered by 'Botanical Latin'.
  'Flowering plants' is a very good illustrated book with descriptions of flowering plant families. Try one of these books for more technical information.
  'The visual dictionary' is beautifully illustrated.

  • Stearn W.T.:Botanical Latin; 2 ed 1973, David and Charles. (there is a third edition)
  • Heywood V. (editor): Flowering Plants of the World, 1993 Batsford, London
  • Lindsay et.al. :The visual dictionary of plants; 1992, Dorling Kindersly, London

  Besides the already mentioned web-sites I will add for this moment only one http://www.euronet.nl/users/mbleeker/index_nl.html
  This is a nice website with lots of links to (ethno/eco/taxo) botanical literature and sites of interest.
  
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