sexual distinctions in the titles to the Classes and Orders." Darwin held the opposite position; he maintained that Linnaeus's works should be translated as literally as possible and that the sexual references in the nomenclature should be retained. In 1783 and 1787, A Botanical Society, at Lichfield - almost always incorrectly called the Botanical Society of Lichfield, founded by Darwin and several of his friends specifically to translate Linnaeus's works, issued their own English translation, A System of Vegetables, that categorized over 1400 plants. Assisted by Samuel Johnson, they coined over fifty new botanical words; it is this work, along with the group's The Families of Plants that introduced the words stamen and pistil into the English language, for example. By 1796 their translation had prevailed and Withering was forced to adopt their vocabulary in later editions of his work. Linnaean system The reliability and usefulness of the Linnaean system was a subject of much debate when Darwin was composing The Loves of the Plants, leading scholars to conclude that one of his intentions in publishing the poem was to defend the Linnaean classification scheme. Linnaeus had proposed that, like humans, plants are male and female and reproduce sexually; he also described his system using highly sexualized language. Therefore, as scholar Janet Browne writes, “to be a Linnaean taxonomist was to believe in the sex life of flowers.” In his poem, Darwin not only embraced Linnaeus's classification scheme but also his metaphors. At the same time that he was defending Linnaeus's system, however, Darwin was also refining it. Linnaeus classified plants solely on the number of reproductive organs they had, but Darwin's poem also emphasized “proportion, length, and arrangement of the [sexual] organs”. Writing and publication Inspired by his enjoyment of his own botanical garden but primarily by Anna Seward's poem “Verses Written in Dr. Darwin's Botanic Garden” (1778), Darwin decided to compose a poem that would embody Linnaeus's ideas. (Darwin would later include an edited version of Seward's poem in The Loves of the Plants without her permission and without acknowledgement. Seward was rankled by this treatment and complained of Darwin's inattention to her authorial rights in her Memoirs of Erasmus Darwin.) According to Seward, Darwin said that “the Linnean System is unexplored poetic ground, and an [sic] happy subject for the muse. It affords fine scope for poetic landscape; it suggests metamorphoses of the Ovidian kind, though reversed.”