Adrien-Henri Laurent de Jussieu was a French botanist. He is known for his Embryons Monocotylédones, on which he worked for more than 13 years, and Cours élémentaire de botanique, which was translated into many languages.
Background
Adrien-Henri Laurent de Jussieu was born on December 23, 1797, in Paris, France. The last in a long familial line of botanists, he was the son of Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and Thérèse Adrienne du Boisneuf. As a third-generation botanist, he was able to follow his vocation with considerably less initial difficulty than his father and granduncles.
Education
Jussieu received thorough classical training and developed a predilection for belles lettres, befriending Prosper Mérimée, Stendhal, and Victor Jacquemont. He turned to both medicine and botany, specializing from the beginning in the latter. His thesis, written in Latin (quite uncharacteristic at the time in France), consisted of a monograph on the Euphorbiaceae (1824), in which he pursued work his father had begun in tracing natural affinities on the basis of morphological relationship with attention to pharmaceutical and chemical detail.
Career
In 1826 Jussieu succeeded his father as professor of botany at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. His Botanique Cours élémentaire d'histoire naturelle went through no fewer than twelve editions between 1842 and 1884. Jussieu’s botanical work, mainly monographic, showed an increasing emphasis on the provision of new characteristics from related fields, especially anatomy and developmental morphology. His main contributions to the general theory of taxonomy were his articles “Taxonomie (végétale)” and “Géographie botanique” in d’Orbigny’s Dictionnaire universel des sciences naturelles. His other famous works include Embryons Monocotylédones, on which he worked for 13 years, and his Cours élémentaire de botanique which had been a well-known work outside France for many decades.
At the Muséum Jussieu, in collaboration with his friend Adolphe Brongniart, built up a large herbarium, which was supplemented, at Jussieu’s death, by the family herbarium. His inestimable library was dispersed at public auction.
Jussieu was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 1824. In 1850 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also a member of the Société Philomathique de Paris and the French Academy of Sciences.
Personality
Judging from the number of persons who took Jussieu's courses at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, he was a brilliant teacher.
Connections
Jussieu was married to Madeleine Antoinette Adèle Émilie de Jussieu.