Dutch botanist. Maarten (sometimes Latinised to Martinus) Houttuyn's father was a physician in a Mennonite community and taught him medicine from a young age. Also studying humanities, Latin, Greek, geometry, physics chemistry and astronomy, he learnt the Tournefortian classification system for plants. In 1747 Houttuyn enrolled into Leyden University and just two years later was a qualified medical doctor. During these two years he also managed to produce a son, named Willem after his father, with a woman of considerably lower social standing than himself (Hester Hoorn). In 1750 they were married and baptised into the Mennonite faith to appease Maarten's family. Thereafter based in Amsterdam he registered as a physician, although it appears he never practised as one. Making contact with his second cousin, the publisher Frans Houttuyn, the pair embarked upon a business venture in which Maarten would translate important medical works into Dutch.
While hard at work translating, Maarten Houttuyn decided to begin another grand project. He wished to publish (in Dutch) an account of all that was known at the time about natural history, particularly aimed at the general public. The first volume of Natuurlyke Historie was published in 1761 and the final (37th) volume in 1785 when he was 65 years of age. 14 of these volumes deal with the plant kingdom and contain some 8,600 pages of text. Illustrated with 105 copper plates depicting 275 plant species, Houttuyn did not follow Linnaeus's Systema naturae as precisely as he claimed, but used a natural system for the major division of the plants. He does, however, devote a large part of the botanical section to providing an overview of the sexual system and discussion of the systems of other botanists such as Michel Adanson. In the end, the series was too costly and bulky to be quite the laypersons' text he envisaged, but it was highly praised in the scientific community and several newer editions were published after his death. Continuing to produce books on a variety of subjects, he became well known in the Netherlands and in Germany, where his magnum opus was translated. Because of the name given to the German version (Linnaeus' Systema Naturae) it is still often mistakenly attributed to Carl Linnaeus. In the rest of Europe, however, it was less accessible because Dutch was less widely understood.
Abroad Houttuyn was famous, however, for his vast natural history cabinet, a collection he amassed despite never being particularly well off. Using his specimens to aid the descriptions in Natuurlyke Historie he was not unwilling to auction his items once he had finished with them. Interestingly, he wrote a catalogue of his cabinet in which he had to give names to many unidentified zoological specimens. This catalogue was ignored for many years and has now been suppressed by the Commission on Zoological Nomenclature to avoid potentially having to change more recently established names.
Sources:
M. Boeseman and W. de Ligny, 2004, "Martinus Houttuyn (1720-1798) and his contributions to the natural sciences with emphasis on zoology", Zoologische Verhandelingen, 349: 1-221
F.A. Stafleu, 1971, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans
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