Prospero Alpini (also known as Prosper Alpinus, Prospero Alpinio and Prosper Alpin) (November 23, 1553 - February 6, 1617), was an Italian physician and botanist.
Born at Marostica, in the republic of Venice, in his youth he served for a time in the Milanese army, but in 1574 he went to study medicine at Padua. After taking his doctor's degree in 1578, he settled as a physician in Campo San Pietro, a small town in the Paduan territory. But his ta...
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Prospero Alpini (also known as Prosper Alpinus, Prospero Alpinio and Prosper Alpin) (November 23, 1553 - February 6, 1617), was an Italian physician and botanist.
Born at Marostica, in the republic of Venice, in his youth he served for a time in the Milanese army, but in 1574 he went to study medicine at Padua. After taking his doctor's degree in 1578, he settled as a physician in Campo San Pietro, a small town in the Paduan territory. But his tastes were botanical, and to extend his knowledge of exotic plants he travelled to Egypt in 1580 as physician to George Emo or Hemi, the Venetian consul in Cairo.
In Egypt he spent three years, and from a practice in the management of Date Palms, which he observed in that country, he seems to have deduced the doctrine of the sexual difference of plants, which was adopted as the foundation of the Linnaean taxonomy system. He says that "the female date-trees or palms do not bear fruit unless the branches of the male and female plants are mixed...
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