Genera Plantarum Secundum Ordines Naturales Disposita

While reorganizing the museum’s botanical collections, he wrote the Genera Plantarum Secundum Ordines Naturales Disposita (1836–40; “Plant Genera Arranged According to a Natural Order”), a system of classification in which he treated 6,835 genera of plants (6,285 of vascular plants). Endlicher’s system was based on erroneous ideas concerning the modes of growth of different types of plant life, it included a relatively modern approach to the classification of certain lower vascular plant families and was widely adopted on the European continent for a time. His Genera Plantarum, in which he divided the plant kingdom into thallophytes (including the algae, fungi, and lichens) and cormophytes (including the mosses, ferns, and seed plants), remained a valuable descriptive index to plant families and genera.