In the mid-18th century, the Finnish/Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus, proposed a system of plant categorization based on sexual characteristics (the number of stamens, pistols), thus revolutionizing the fields of botany and natural history and inaugurating the taxonomical revolution. What had been a cacophony of naming and categorization practices prior to the advent of the Linnaeus’s methodology became streamlined and standardized. This paper considers the spread of the “taxonomical revolution” to the Arabic speaking world through an examination of Ahmed Effendi’s, al-Āyāt al-bayyināt fī ʿilm al-nabāt (Cairo: Bulaq, 1866 C.E./1283 A.H.). One of only several books published in Arabic in the mid-19th century about botany, al-Ayat offers an in-depth consideration of the most current taxonomical debates and controversies. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, Ottoman modernizers were very aware of and interested in the translation of scientific texts and the adoption and proliferation of modern science. Yet there is a paucity of scholarship on 19th century Arab/Ottoman natural history. My paper begins to address this lacuna in the 19th century history of science in the Arabic speaking lands of the Ottoman Empire. It does so by situating the publication of al-Āyāt al-bayyināt fī ʿilm al-nabāt within broader scientific publication trends in Egypt and the Levant, on the one hand, and within the context of the spread of the statistical age in the region, on the other. I argue that as categorization and counting became increasingly important for the modernizing state, so too did the idea of modern classification systems in understanding and interpreting the natural world.