Ross,

You suppose rightly; the Linnaean system took time to catch on, and it
caught on in different disciplines at different rates. It's easy to forget
that Linnaeus made a career of classifying, and his work was spread out over
many publications and many editions. While he was still a student in
Holland, he developed his first set of rules of nomenclature (Fundamenta
Botanica, 1736). The publication proved to be popular enough that he
extended them a year later in his Critica Botanica (1737), and so on.
Eventually he tackled the whole plant kingdom, and then the animal kingdom
too.

Linnaeus excelled at classifying modern plants above all else, and the first
consistently binominal (genus + species) edition of his Species Plantarum
has been chosen as the beginning of botanical nomenclature (1753, first
edition). The same for his Systema Naturae (1758, 10th edition). But
Linnaeus didn't do as well with the mosses, so the starting point for mosses
is the first reliable treatise on them, by Hedwig (Species Muscorum, 1801).
Likewise for fungi (1801 and 1821) and fossil plants (1820); Linnaeus
scarcely mentioned fossil plants at all, and his descriptions of fungi (and
often algae) are simply unrecognizable.

For comparison, Gary Rosenberg estimates that 97 percent of Linnaeus'
species of mollusks are valid today. Not bad, eh? His estimate for Petuch is
71 percent, and E. H. Vokes, 84 percent, which aren't bad either. For
Lamarck, who did such a good job classifying the mollusks at the higher
ranks, only 32 percent. As the Bernstein song goes, "What a waste of money
and time!" See his article on "Lumping and Splitting" on Conch-Net:
http://coa.acnatsci.org/conchnet/ac-lump.html

The first proposal for a Zoological Code was initiated in 1842, and the
first proposal for a Botanical Code in 1867, but it took some time before
they became nearly global. Some groups of biologists disagree en masse with
minor provisions of the Codes, for instance, for historical reasons,
specialists on graptolites use the word 'variety' to mean 'subspecies',
placing them in civil disobedience with the Zoological Code.

Most of this information is from Savory, "Naming the Living World".

Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of Alabama