John Ray’s Historia Plantarum is a three-volume work in Latin comprising three volumes. Volumes I and II were published in 1686 and 1688, and contain approximately 1,000 pages each. Volume III is a supplementary volume published in 1704 consisting of three parts (the Supplementum, Dendrologia and the Appendix) that are separately numbered. Like other botanical publications of the early modern period, it is a work that aimed to create a world-wide encyclopaedia of the flora then known to European Natural Historians, listing and describing the known species at the time. Increasing numbers of new species were reaching taxonomists in Britain and Europe every year, and Ray classified in the Historia Plantarum, approximately 18,000 plant species with details about their structures, anatomy, and botanical differences. Common names are often provided and the descriptions typically also included details related to habitats, times of flowering, whether annual or perennial as well as medicinal properties. Historia Plantarum pre-dates the Linnean binomial system of nomenclature and so the names it enumerates are typically polynomial names.

Hans Sloane (1660-1753) and his assistants used Sloane’s personal copy of Ray’s Historia Plantarum to classify and catalogue the plant specimens found throughout the 337 Horti Sicci in his herbarium. This copy, which is housed within the NHM’s Historical Botanical Collection, alongside the Sloane Herbarium, contains a plethora of handwritten annotations and markings. In the side margins of the folios are handwritten notations that are next to, or, in very close proximity to a plant name. These annotations take the form of ‘H.S. [Hortus siccus number] [folio number] and act as an indexing reference to the physical location of a specimen within the herbarium. In some cases, an additional numbers specifies a precise specimen on a folio or page. At the top and bottom margins of the pages (headers and footers), are additional handwritten annotations containing plant names and indexing references to the herbarium following the same volume and folio format found within the side margins. Here, the plant species names are those not already included within Ray’s list.

Together, the marginal annotations, along with the headers and footers provide the most comprehensive (albeit still partial) index to the Sloane Herbarium. As a result of the AHRC-funded project Sloane Lab: looking back to build future shared collections, which forms part of the Towards a National Collection (TaNC) programme, the data in this copy of Ray’s Historia Plantarum, most relevant for digitally searching the Sloane Herbarium (and therefore the founding botanical collection of the NHM), has been mobilised and is presented here in an excel format.

A total of 40,174 specimens are referred to across the three volumes of Ray's Historia Plantarum. The majority (29803) are referred to names enumerated by Ray; while the remainder are referred to additional names listed in the headers and footers.

The Data description provides details of the data contained in this dataset: https://data.nhm.ac.uk/dataset/sloane-historia-plantarum/resource/a4a8f309-f496-40d9-af76-730adade9cb8

This work was supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council Towards a National Collection Programme (Grant AH/W003457/1).