Augustus Quirinus Rivinus

Augustus Quirinus Rivinus (9 December 1652 – 20 December 1723), also known as August Bachmann or A. Q. Bachmann, was a German physician and botanist who helped to develop better ways of classifying plants.

Life and work

Rivinus was born in Leipzig, Germany, and studied at the University of Leipzig (1669–1671), continued his studies in the University of Helmstedt (where he received M.D. in 1676). In 1677, he started lecturing in medicine at the University of Leipzig, in 1691 appointed to two chairs, that of physiology and of botany, and made the curator of the University medical garden. In 1701, he became professor of pathology, in 1719, professor of therapeutics and permanent dean of the Faculty of Medicine. The same year he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Because of his interest also in astronomy, by the last decade of his life (around 1713), Rivinus was nearly completely blind from looking at sunspots. He died in Leipzig.

In his Introductio generalis in rem herbariam and three books on the plant orders (which comprised but a small part of the whole projected work on a methodical description of plants), Rivinus introduced several important innovations which were later used by other botanists (Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and Carl Linnaeus among them). He classified the plants according to the structure of the flower. Like John Ray he extensively used dichotomous keys which led first to the higher groups, which he called higher genera (genus summum) of plant orders (ordo), and then to the lower genera.