The Swedish botanist Carl Peter Thunberg (1743 1828), a physician and pupil of Linnaeus, carried out his most important work in South Africa and Japan. Having studied in Amsterdam and Leiden, he was asked to go plant-hunting in areas where the Dutch East India Company's trading activities were opening up territory for scientific exploration. In 1771 he travelled to South Africa as a ship's doctor, spending three years searching for, classifying and propagating plants, while at the same time becoming fluent in Dutch, as only the Dutch were allowed to enter Japan, his ultimate destination. Having acquired many Japanese specimens, he continued his travels and returned to Sweden in 1779. Three fascicles of this influential reference work in Latin on the South African flora were issued between 1807 and 1813. Reissued here is the full version edited by the Austrian botanist Josef August Schultes (1773 1831) and published in 1823."