Michel Adanson (7 April 17273 August 1806) was an 18th-century French botanist and naturalist who traveled to Senegal to study flora and fauna. He proposed a "natural system" of taxonomy distinct from the binomial system forwarded by Linnaeus.

Personal history

Adanson was born at Aix-en-Provence. His family moved to Paris in 1730. After leaving the Collège Sainte-Barbe, he was employed in the cabinets of R. A. F. Réaumur and Bernard de Jussieu, as well as in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris. He attended lectures at the Jardin du Roi and the Collège Royal in Paris from 1741 to 1746. At the end of 1748, funded by a director of the Compagnie des Indes, he left France on an exploring expedition to Senegal. He remained there for five years, collecting and describing numerous animals and plants. He also collected specimens of every object of commerce, delineated maps of the country, made systematic meteorological and astronomical observations, and prepared grammars and dictionaries of the languages spoken on the banks of the Sénégal. Historian of science Conway Zirkle has noted that "Adanson was Lamarck's predecessor at the Jardin Royal, and Lamarck could hardly have remained unfamiliar with Adanson 's publications. Adanson not only described evolution in his "Familles de plantes", published in 1763 when Lamarck was a young man of twenty, but also suggested that the changes in specific characteristics were produced through the inheritance of acquired characters."

Adanson made a serious attempt to classify fungi based on their fruit body complexity. He was the first botanist to classify lichens with fungi.

Later life

He had been elected a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1759, and he latterly subsisted on a small pension it had conferred on him. Of this he was deprived in the dissolution of the Academy by the Constituent Assembly in 1793, and was consequently reduced to such a depth of poverty as to be unable to appear before the French Institute when it invited him to take his place among its members. (It is said that he possessed neither a white shirt, a coat nor a whole pair of breeches.) Afterwards he was granted a pension sufficient to relieve his simple wants. Subsequently, the Hunt Institute republished his Familles des plantes in two volumes (1963–64), under the editorship of George H. M. Lawrence.

His only child, Aglaé Adanson (1775–1852) became a French horticulturalist, writer and creator of the Baleine Arboretum, a National Historic monument, which is operated today by his great-great-great-granddaughter, Louise Courteix Adanson.

A species of turtle, Pelusios adansonii, is named in his honor.

In literature

In The Reverse of the Medal, the eleventh novel in the series and, again, in The Commodore, the seventeenth novel of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, Stephen Maturin makes reference to Adanson. He elaborates on Adanson's botanical work in Senegal, the prodigious volume of his written output and his penurious circumstances at the time of his death.

Stephen Maturin:

David Diop's novel La porte du voyage sans retour (The door of the voyage without return) was inspired by and is about Adanson's experiences in Senegal.

See also

  • Arboretum de Balaine
  • Adanson system
  • :Category: Taxa named by Michel Adanson

References

Bibliography

  • Eiselt, J. N. 1836 Geschichte, Systematik und Literatur der Insectenkunde, von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. Als Handbuch für den Jünger und als Repertorium für den Meister der Entomologie bearbeitet. Leipzig, C. H. F. Hartmann : VIII+255 p.
  • A Voyage to Senegal, the Isle of Goree, and the River Gambia, 1759—Translation of Histoire naturelle du Sénégal