The name "Quinquina" was used for quinine trees by Condamine in a work published in 1731 (cited by Boehmer) and/or 1740 (cited by Kuntze), before the start of today's formal plant nomenclature. These trees were later formally named as Cinchona by Linnaeus in 1753, in the earliest work in our currently accepted plant nomenclature. Therefore the oldest name available today for these trees is Cinchona.

However several 18th- and 19th-century authors used an earlier starting date for plant names, and they noted that Condamine had previously published "Quinquina" for these same plants. They therefore considered his the oldest and thus preferable name for these trees. The name Quinquina was first formally published in our modern plant nomenclature by Boehmer, who cited Cinchona in synonymy with it and thus made Quinquina a superfluous, illegitimate name. This name was later published again as "Quinquina Kuntze", which some authors have inaccurately considered to be the first publication of Condamine's name after 1753 (e.g., Andersson, 1998). Kuntze's Quinquina has been incorrectly cited by various authors as a legitimate name that is nomenclaturally separate from Cinchona, and Andersson (1998: 27) even attempted to lectotypify it. However because Quinquina was explicitly published as a replacement name for Cinchona, its type is the same as Cinchona's.

Author: C.M. Taylor.
The content of this web page was last revised on 29 Nov. 2016.
Taylor web page: http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/Research/curators/taylor.shtml