The cactus was brought back to Europe, probably brought back by Columbus after returning from the Caribbean for cultivation. A melocactus cactus plant was reported in 1570 (Rowley, 1997, p. 43). In 1588, physician Jacobus Theodorus described globular and columnar cacti in his Tabernaemontanus (Barthlott, 1979, p. 1).
In 1581 the Flemish botanist Matthias de L'Obel, in 1601 the French botanist Charles de L 'É cluse or Carolus Clusius, in 1597 the English physician and horticulturist John Gerard mentioned the cactus plant with illustrations.
Cacti continued to be brought to Europe from the New World, and by the mid-18th century, more than 20 species of cacti had been described, some illustrated with illustrations. At the turn of the 17th~18th centuries, cacti were divided into four different genera: in 1698, Paul Hermann described the plant Cereus in the book "Paradisus Batavus". In 1700, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort published a work entitled Opuntia and Melocactus (1719). Charles Plumier in 1703 in the New Plant Genus of America "Nova Plantarum Americanarum Genera" (Barthlott 1988; Mottram 1993) describes the genus Pereskia.
The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus has brought together a lot of knowledge about plants in his many writings. The most important is the 1753 on the classification of plant species, as it was designated as the starting point for the modern binomial named classification. Linnaeus studied 16 species of cacti in the Hortus Cliffortianus document of 1737, placing them in the genus Cactus and the genus Wood unicorn. Surprisingly, however, in Species Plantarum, he classifies the early names of cactus species as a genus taxa and downgrades 22 species of cacti to "Cactus", which is probably the earliest spelling for "cactus", while the acronym "Melocactus" (now collectively known for the genus Ceptica) was commonly used by most cactus plants at the time (Motram, 1993).
He declared that "Cactus" was an old name for a spiny plant that was well suited to these thorny plants from the New World (Shaw, 1976). Linnaeus's four taxa are named polynomials, which are relics of old plant nomenclature, such as: "Cerei angulati erecti", "Cerei repentes radiculis lateralibus", "Echino Melocacti subrotundi", and "Opuntiae compressae articulis" proliferis”。
(To be continued)