Background
Jean Victoir Audouin was born on April 27, 1797 in Paris, France. Audouin was the second child of Victor Joseph Audouin, a notary, and Jeanne Marie Pierrette Enée.
Jean Victor Audouin (27 April 1797 – 9 November 1841), sometimes Victor Audouin, was a French naturalist, an entomologist, herpetologist, ornithologist, and malacologist.
entomologist herpetologist malacologist scientist Zoologist
Jean Victoir Audouin was born on April 27, 1797 in Paris, France. Audouin was the second child of Victor Joseph Audouin, a notary, and Jeanne Marie Pierrette Enée.
Audouin began his studies at Rheims in 1807, and continued them at Paris in 1809 and at Lucca from 1812 to 1814; in Lucca he stayed with a relative who was an official in the household of Princess Elisa Baciocchi.
In 1816 Audouin met the mineralogist Alexandre Brongniart, who hired him as his secretary and had a notable influence on Audouin’s scientific career. In the same year Audouin published his first entomological work, and in 1820 he read his important paper, “Recherches anatomiques sur le thorax des animaux articulés et celui des insectes en particulier,” before the Académie des Sciences. This report won him the praise of Cuvier and was printed in 1824.
He and other naturalists founded the Société d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris in 1822, and in 1824 he began publication of the Annales des sciences naturelles, an important scientific periodical still in existence. His collaborators on the journal were Adolphe Brongniart and Jean-Baptiste Dumas, both of whom later became his brothers-in-law. In 1825 he became assistant to Lamarck and Latreille at the Museum of Natural History in Paris; and the following year he was asked to finish the work of Savigny (then incapacitated by serious eye trouble) on the invertebrates collected during the Egyptian expedition of 1798–1799.
The same year, 1826, Audouin and Henri Milne Edwards began a course of anatomical, physiological, and biological research on the marine invertebrates of the Breton and Norman coast. These were pioneer studies of this type in France. It was also in 1826 that Audouin presented his doctoral thesis on the chemical, pharmaceutical, and medical natural history of the cantharides.
In 1827 and 1828 he and Milne Edwards published the results of their anatomical and physiological research on crustacea. In 1830 he replaced Latreille as assistant naturalist at the Natural History Museum. He and Milne Edwards then published, in 1832, the first volume of their Recherches pour servir à l’histoire naturelle du littoral de la France. This work initiated the bionomic classification of coastal marine invertebrates. Also in 1832, Audouin and other entomologists founded the Société Entomologique de France, and in 1833 he succeeded Latreille as professor of zoology (in the chair dealing with crustacea, arachnids, and insects) at the Natural History Museum.
From 1834 on, he specialized in agricultural entomology, and in 1836–1837 he confirmed the observations of Agostino Bassi concerning the muscardine of the silkworm (Beauveria bassiana). On 5 February 1838, Audouin was elected a member of the Académie des Sciences (Section d’Économic Rurale).
He died after a short illness, and his Histoire naturelle des insectes nuisibles à la vigne was finished by his collaborator, Émile Blanchard, and his friend Henri Milne Edwards, in 1842.
Audouin’s work is both that of a scrupulously careful morphologist and anatomist of Cuvier’s school, and that of a biologist who has left behind important observations on the physiology of crustacea as well as on the ethology of various insects harmful to cultivated plants. This last phase of his research marks Audouin’s work as the precursor of modern applied entomology.
Jean Victor Audouin was a member of the Société d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris from 1822. In 1832 he became a member of the Société Entomologique de France.