Background

Michel Adanson was born on April 7, 1727, at Aix-en-Provence, France. He belonged to an Auvergne family that moved to Provence at the beginning of the eighteenth century and to Paris about 1730.

Education

Michel Adanson was educated at the Plessis Sorbon, the Collège Royal, and the Jardin du Roi from 1741 to 1746. Among his maitres were Pierre Le Monnier, Reaumur, G.-F. Rouelle, and Antoine and Bernard de Jussieu.

Career

Michel Adanson made his first four-year scientific expedition to Senegal on behalf of the Compagnie des Indes and brought back a large group of natural history specimens; a few of these later became part of the royal collection, then under the care of Button. While traveling in Africa, Adanson was elected (24 July 1750) a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences. His travel journal (1757) was accompanied by a general survey of the living mollusks he had found in Senegal. His classification of mollusks was an original one; based on the anatomical structure of the living animals inside the shells, it appeared the same year as the work of Argenville, who claimed to have originated such a scheme.

In 1761 Adanson was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society of London, and in 1763-1764 he published Familles des plantes. In this book he proclaimed his contempt for “systems” and proposed a natural classification based upon all characters rather than upon a few arbitrarily selected ones, an attempt that brought him into conflict with Linnaeus.

Adanson knew Diderot but did not collaborate on the Encyclopédie, although he played an important role in the publication of the supplement (1776) by Panckoucke, to whom he sent more than 400 articles. He had his own views about encyclopedias, and in 1775 he presented a plan for one to the Académie des Sciences. By that time he had amassed a collection of documents, observations of his own, and natural history specimens. Nothing came of this plan, however, and he spent the rest of his life in futile attempts to publish his own encyclopedia.

On 23 July 1759 Adanson had been elected adjoint botaniste, on 25 February 1773, associé botaniste; and on 6 December 1782, académicien pensionnaire. Upon the creation of the Institut de France, he was immediately selected a member of the first college. Later Napoleon made him a member of the Legion of Honor.

Adanson survived the Revolution without political difficulties, but sulfered much from the financial crash. His whole life, however, was one of periodic financial insecurity, alleviated by the patronage obtained for him by his friends and by the life annuity granted in the 1760’s when his natural history collection became part of the Cabinet du Roi.

Adanson died at Paris after months of severe suffering, on the 3rd of August 1806, requesting, as the only decoration of his grave, a garland of flowers gathered from the fifty-eight families he had differentiated -"a touching though transitory image," says Cuvier, "of the more durable monument which he has erected to himself in his works."

Achievements

• In many respects Adanson played an important role in the development of science. His chief achievement was in developing the system of classification of plants and mollusks. However, it is only recently that his historical influence and his role in introducing modern statistical methods into systematic botany have received proper recognition. He also made a significant contribution by studying static electricity in the torpedo fish, the tourmaline, and various plants; agricultural problems concerning corn, wheat, barley, and fruits; microscopic animalcules; and the circulation of sap in lower plants. He also experimented on regeneration of the limbs and head of frogs and snails. Although he kept most of his materials for his own use, we know that he was an important contributor to Buffon’s Histoire naturelle générale, where he is quoted more than a hundred times.
  
  He had sent several hundred new plant species from Senegal to Bernard de Jussieu, and before his controversy with Linnaeus, he had sent to Sweden a number of African plants that Linnaeus said he included with those of Hasselquist. His general herbarium, now in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, contains about 30,000 specimens, many of which have been studied; the plants he sent to Jussieu were used by A. L. de Jussieu for his Genera plant arum and by later botanists. Lamarck used Adanson’s articles in the Encyclopédie supplement for his Dictionnaire de botanique.

Works

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  • Histoire Naturelle Du Sénégal: Coquillages

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  • Histoire Naturelle Du Sénégal: Coquillages - Primary Source Edition (French Edition)

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  • A Voyage to Senegal, the Isle of Goree, and the River Gambia (Classic Reprint)

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  • Cours d'Histoire Naturelle Fait en 1772

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  • Histoire Naturelle du Sénégal: Coquillages; Avec la Relation Abrégée d'un Voyage Fait en ce Pays, Pendant les Années 1749

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  • A Voyage to Senegal: The Isle of Goreé, and the River Gambia

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  • Familles Des Plantes Par M. Adanson... (French Edition)

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  • Familles Des Plantes, Volume 2 - Primary Source Edition (French Edition)

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  • Michel Adanson (1727-1806) et la méthode naturelle de classification botanique.
  • The Bicentennial of Michel Asanson's Familles des plantes: Part One

Views

Recent historical studies have shown that Adanson’s views were shared by many Parisian botanists and that he was responsible for the maintenance of Joseph Tournefort’s system at the Jardin du Roi until 1774, when A. L. de Jussieu’s system was adopted. Adanson owed much to Bernard de Jussieu’s plant families as they were developed in his manuscript plan for the Trianon garden in which he arranged the plants in beds in an order corresponding to his system of classification. He soon recognized that his Familles des plantes was only an outline of his general conception, and in 1769 he prepared a new edition that was never published.

Adanson is also known as being an early proponent of the inheritance of acquired characters and a limited view of evolution.

Membership

In 1761 Adanson was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society of London, and 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.

Personality

Intellectually, he was perhaps equally insecure, admired by many of his contemporaries and disliked by others for both scientific and personal reasons.

Quotes from others about the person

• 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."
  
  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:
  
  "He was a very great naturalist, as zealous, prolific and industrious as he was unfortunate. I knew him in Paris when I was young, and admired him extremely; so did Cuvier. At that time he was very kind to us. When he was little more than a youth he went to Senegal, stayed there five or six years, observing, collecting, dissecting, describing and classifying; and he summarised all this in a brief but eminently respectable natural history of the country, from which I learnt almost everything I know of the African flora and fauna. A valuable book, indeed, and the outcome of intense and long sustained effort; but I can scarcely venture to name it on the same day as his maximum opus – twenty seven large volumes devoted to a systematic account of created beings and substances and the relations between them, together with a hundred and fifty volumes more of index, exact scientific description, separate treatises and a vocabulary: a hundred and fifty volumes, Jack, with forty thousand drawings and thirty thousand specimens. All this he showed to the Academy. It was much praised but never published. Yet he continued working on it in poverty and old age, and I like to think he was happy in his immense design, and with the admiration of such men as Jussieu and the Institute in general."

Connections

associate:

Joseph Tournefort

In Adanson`s Familles naturelles des plantes, which he published in 1763, his principle of arrangement in adherence to natural botanical relations was based on the system of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort.

References

• Geschichte, Systematik und Literature der Insectenkunde, von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. Als Hanbuch für den Jnger und als Repertorium für den Meister der Entomologie
• The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance No one in this century can speak with greater authority on the progress of ideas in biology than Ernst Mayr. And no book has ever established the life sciences so firmly in the mainstream of Western intellectual history as The Growth of Biological Thought. Ten years in preparation, this is a work of epic proportions, tracing the development of the major problems of biology from the earliest attempts to find order in the diversity of life to modern research into the mechanisms of gene transmission.
• History of Paradise: THE GARDEN OF EDEN IN MYTH AND TRADITION Explores the conviction that paradise existed in a precise although unreachable earthly location. Delving into the writings of dozens of medieval and Renaissance thinkers, from Augustine to Dante, this title presents a study of the meaning of Original Sin and the human yearning for paradise.
• The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles Who was Richard Kemp, after whom the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle is named? Is Wake’s Gecko named after Berkeley’s Marvalee Wake? Or perhaps her husband, David? Why do so many snakes and lizards have Werner in their name? This reference book answers these and thousands of other questions about the origins of the vernacular and scientific names of reptiles across the globe. From Agkistrodon piscivorus conanti, the Florida cottonmouth subspecies named for Roger Conant, to Xantusia, the night lizard genera namesake of John Xantus, this dictionary covers everyone after whom an extant or recently extinct reptile has been named. The entries include a brief bio-sketch, a list of the reptiles that bear the individual’s name, the names of reptiles erroneously thought to be associated with the person, and a summary of major―and sometimes obscure or even incidental―contributions made by the person to herpetology and zoology. An introductory chapter explains how to use the book and describes the process of naming taxa. Easy to use and filled with addictive―and highly useful―information about the people whose names will be carried into the future on the backs of the world’s reptiles, The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles is a handy and fun book for professional and amateur herpetologists alike.