Perleb

Work

Perleb was an author of numerous scientific publications and was a friend of Freiburg historian Heinrich Schreiber. He worked on the natural method of the classification of plants. In 1818 he translated de Candolle's Essai sur les propriétés médicales des plantes comparées avec leur classification naturelle into German as Versuch über die Arzneikräfte der Pflanzen, verglichen mit den äußeren Formen und der natürlichen Classeneintheilung derselben, with additions and comments. This was followed in 1826 by his Lehrbuch der Naturgeschichte des Pflanzenreichs in which he developed his own classification, based on that of de Candolle, but further developing the idea of a hierarchy in which orders were introduced as a rank between families and classes. He divided de Candolle's Calyciflorae into those with either fused of free petals and increased his number of subclasses by one. He then developed a key to the diagnostic ranks, updated from the Lehrbuch, his Clavis classium, ordinum et familiarum atque index generum regni vegetabilis (1838), following the method of Ray. In his system, there were 9 classes, 48 orders and 330 families. A second part of the Lehrbuch der Naturgeschichte, the Lehrbuch der Zoologie was published in 1831. He also published an account of the botanical garden at Freiburg, De horto botanico Friburgensi (1829)