De Candolle

De Candolle, AUGUSTIN PYRAMÉ, an eminent botanist, descended from an ancient noble family of Provence, was born at Geneva, 4th February 1778, and was first drawn to the study of botany by the lectures of Vaucher. In 1796-97 he studied chemistry, physics, and botany in Paris, where in 1797 his earliest work, on lichens, was published. Other works quickly followed, including his Astragalogia (1802), and his valuable Essais sur les Propriétés Médicales des Plantes (1804). In 1802 he was elected to an honorary professorship in the Academy of Geneva, but remained in Paris, and delivered his first botanical lectures in the Collège de France in 1804. His Flore Française appeared in four volumes in 1805. Employed by the government, he visited all parts of France and Italy in 1806-12, investigating their botany and agriculture. The results of his journeys are partly embodied in a supplement to the Flore. He was appointed in 1807 to a chair at Montpellier, where he lived from 1810 to 1816; he then retired to Geneva, where a professorship of Botany was founded for him, and where he spent the remainder of his life. He died 9th September 1841. De Candolle was an industrious writer, and the fruits of his valuable studies in systematic botany and the properties and natural affinities of plants are embodied in a considerable number of works. The greatest of these, his Regni Vegetabilis Systema Naturale (vols. i. and ii. Paris, 1818-21), was commenced on too grand a scale, and was continued within more reasonable limits in the Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis (17 vols. 1824-73, the last ten by his son and others). De Candolle bequeathed his collections—including a herbarium of more than 70,000 species of plants—to his son, ALPHONSE DE CANDOLLE (1806-93), on condition of his keeping them open to the public, and of his carrying on the Prodromus. That son, himself a botanist of no mean fame, published several works of note, the most important being Géographie Botanique (2 vols. 1855) and Origine des Plantes Cultivées (1883). He also edited the Mémoires of his father (1862).