Background
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau was born on February 10, 1810, in Valleraugues, France. He was the son of Jean-Framjois de Quatrefages and Marguerite-Henriette-Camille de Cabanes.
University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, Alsace, France
De Quatrefages was sent to study medicine at the University of Strasbourg, where he took the double degree of Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Science. One of his theses being a Théorie d'un coup de canon (November 1829); he first defended the two theses required for the doctoral es sciences: “Theorie d'un coup de canon” (1829) and “Du mouvement des aerolithes consideres comme des masses disseminees dans l’espace par l’impulsion des volcans lunaires” (1830).
Parisian cemetery Montparnasse, Paris, France
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau; French zoologist and anthropologist; Berthézène 10. 2. 1810 – Paris 12. 1. 1892. Tomb of Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau at the Parisian cemetery Montparnasse with portrait bust. Sculpture by Léopold Morice (1846–1919).
1881
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau received the Grand-croix of the Legion of Honor and became a commander of the Legion of Honour.
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau (10 February 1810 – 12 January 1892) was a French biologist.
An engraving of Armand de Quatrefages de Breau, Jean Louis (1810-1892), a French naturalist and anthropologist.
Parisian cemetery Montparnasse, Paris, France
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau; French zoologist and anthropologist; Berthézène 10. 2. 1810 – Paris 12. 1. 1892. Tomb of Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau at the Parisian cemetery Montparnasse with portrait bust. Sculpture by Léopold Morice (1846–1919).
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau, a French biologist.
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréan. Photograph by Eug. Pirou.
University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, Alsace, France
De Quatrefages was sent to study medicine at the University of Strasbourg, where he took the double degree of Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Science. One of his theses being a Théorie d'un coup de canon (November 1829); he first defended the two theses required for the doctoral es sciences: “Theorie d'un coup de canon” (1829) and “Du mouvement des aerolithes consideres comme des masses disseminees dans l’espace par l’impulsion des volcans lunaires” (1830).
anthropologist biologist physician scientist Zoologist
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau was born on February 10, 1810, in Valleraugues, France. He was the son of Jean-Framjois de Quatrefages and Marguerite-Henriette-Camille de Cabanes.
From 1822 to 1826 Quatrefages studied at the College Royal of Tournon, where he showed great enthusiasm for mathematics and the exact sciences. He was sent to study medicine at the University of Strasbourg, where he took the double degree of Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Science. One of his theses being a Théorie d'un coup de canon (November 1829); he first defended the two theses required for the doctoral es sciences: “Theorie d'un coup de canon” (1829) and “Du mouvement des aerolithes consideres comme des masses disseminees dans l’espace par l’impulsion des volcans lunaires” (1830).
He then obtained an assistantship in chemistry and physics at the Strasbourg Faculty of Medicine in 1830, and in 1832 he defended his medical thesis, “L'extroversion de la vessie”.
After defending his medical thesis, “L'extroversion de la vessie” (1832), he established a medical practice in Toulouse (1833). In 1836 he founded the Journal de medecine et de chirurgie de Toulouse, in which he published many articles, especially a series of zoological observations that gained him a provisional appointment to the chair of zoology at the Toulouse Faculty of Sciences. He was, however, disappointed in his academic ambitions and left for Paris in 1840.
In the same year, in Paris, Quatrefages defended two theses for his third doctorate, this time in the natural sciences: “Sur les caracteres zoologiques des rongeurs et sur leur dentition en particulier” and “Sur les rongeurs fossiles.” During this period he earned a meager living by writing popular articles and - thanks to his talent for drawing - by preparing the plates for the new edition of Cuvier’s Le regne animal then being prepared by Henri Milne-Edwards.
From 1840 to 1855 Quatrefages, with the support and advice of Milne-Edwards, studied the invertebrates, publishing more than eighty memoirs on them during this period. He also undertook a series of voyages in order to study animal life along the Atlantic coast of France, and in 1844 he participated in a zoological mission off the Sicilian coast with Milne-Edwards and Emile Blanchard. These expeditions are recorded in his two-volume Souvenirs d'un naturaliste (1854).
In 1850 Quatrefages was awarded the chair of natural history at the Lycee Henri IV in Paris; in April 1852 he replaced Savigny as a member of the anatomy and zoology section of the Academy of Sciences; and in 1855, through the support of Milne-Edwards, he obtained the vacant chair in the natural history of man at the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle. Thus began his career as anthropologist. He managed nonetheless to complete and publish Histoire naturelle des anneles marins et d'eau douce (1865). Moreover, twice between 1857 and 1859 he was sent on missions by the Academy of Sciences to study the devastating diseases attacking the silkworm and to find a means of controlling them.
It was also as a zoologist that Quatrefages approached anthropology when he began to teach that subject at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in 1856. For him, the fundamental problem of this discipline remained the unity of the human species. Nonetheless, he conceived of anthropology in a very broad sense, in which the natural history of man would be associated with a general survey of all human populations, both living and fossil. For the Paris Exposition of 1867, Quatrefages wrote Rapport stir les progres de l'anthropologic, in which he defended his monogenetic ideas. In collaboration with his disciple E.-T. Hamy, who did most of the work, he published Crania ethnica (1882), surveying what was then known of the comparative craniology of living and fossil human races, for which he was trying to achieve a classification.
In 1870 he published a collection of his antitransformist articles as Darwin et ses precurseurs frangais; two more volumes were published in 1894 as Les entitles de Darwin.
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau was the son of a Protestant farmer and most likely kept the same religious affiliation after receiving a Protestant education.
Quatrefages’s zoological views were basically those of his teacher Milne-Edwards. Preoccupied with “organic complication,” Quatrefages wanted to study the degeneration (degradation) of organisms and to ascertain the mechanism by which it took place. Marine invertebrates and especially annelids, because of the multiplicity and diversity of their typical structures, provided him with an abundance of material for this study: “Nowhere else does degeneration appear so extensively and in such variety.”
He viewed this organizational degeneration as a function of a decrease in the physiological division of labor. He accompanied his ideas with a critique of the Cuvierist position, which linked the importance of the functions to that of the organs.
It was on these theoretical positions that Quatrefages established his incorrect and highly controversial theory of phlebenterisme (see, for instance, “Memoires sur les gasteropodes phlebenteres, ordre nouveau de la classe des gasteropodes,” in Annales des sciences nature. In accord with the principle of the physiological division of labor, which implies that when a group of organs with a specific function disappears, the accompanying function continues, Quatrefages assumed the disappearance of the circulatory system in certain creatures.
He first hypothesized its disappearance in the gastropod mollusks, which he called phlebenteres, and later supposed that “almost all types of invertebrates have their derivative phleben-teres." According to Quatrefages, the circulatory system was replaced by the digestive tube, substituted for circulating not the blood but chymified alimentary substances. At first this conception generated much interest and excited a rather hot controversy; but with time, it was quietly abandoned even by Quatrefages’s friends like Milne-Edwards.
Quatrefages often extended his analysis to the tissues. For example, from the work done on his Sicilian expedition he produced a study on the histology of the amphioxus; and he was one of the first to work in comparative histology, although he never accepted the cell theory as applied to animals. Convinced, like Milne-Edwards, of the importance of embryological characteristics for the classification of organisms, he believed that he had surpassed Cuvier and had rediscovered the spirit of A.-L. Jussieu.
Moreover, unlike Cuvier, Quatrefages believed that there were transitional forms between certain “em- branchements”; and he created the class Gephyrea (a class now comprising Priapulida, Sipunculida, and Echiurida) as a link between the Articulata and the Radiata (see “Memoire sur Fechiure de Gaertner,” in Annales des Sciences Naturelles.
Convinced by Lartet of the existence of fossil man, Quatrefages in 1863 supported Boucher de Perthes after the discovery at Abbeville of a human jaw accompanied by flint axes.
In 1871, at the Fifth International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology held at Bologna, he came out in favor of the view that man existed as far back as the Tertiary. Nevertheless, Quatrefages remained a lifelong opponent of the Darwinian theory and of the simian origin of man; he also defended the conception of a human kingdom distinct from the animal one (L'unite de I'espece humaine, 1861).
Quatrefages became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1852.