Background
Pierre-Joseph van Beneden was born on December 19, 1809, in Mechelen, Belgium.
1864
Pierre Joseph van Beneden. Photographer: Ghemar Freres.
Mechelen, Belgium
Pierre-Joseph van Beneden
Pierre-Joseph van Beneden, Belgian zoologist and paleontologist.
The bust of Pierre Joseph van Beneden, zoologist (1809-1894). Artist: Guillaume Geefs Anvers 1805 - Schaerbeek / Bruxelles 1883.
Royal Society, 6–9 Carlton House Terrace, London, England, United Kingdom
In 1875 Pierre Joseph van Beneden became a foreign member of the Royal Society of London.
paleontologist scientist Zoologist
Pierre-Joseph van Beneden was born on December 19, 1809, in Mechelen, Belgium.
Van Beneden studied medicine at the State University of Leuven, and studied zoology in Paris under Georges Cuvier. After studying the humanities, Van Beneden was apprenticed to the pharmacist Louis Stoffels, a great collector of natural history specimens, whose house was a veritable museum that inspired Van Beneden to become a zoologist. At that time in the kingdom of the Low Countries, it was not necessary to attend a university in order to become a pharmacist, but Stoffels recognized in Van Beneden the talents of a scientist and persuaded the boy’s parents to send him to the University of Louvain, where he studied medicine.
After obtaining the Doctor of Medicne, Van Beneden went to Paris to study zoology, intending to become a professor of zoology at one of the state universities of the new kingdom of Belgium.
After Van Beneden went to Paris to study zoology, intending to become a professor of zoology in Belgium, since other professors had already been appointed to these chairs, he accepted the post of professor of zoology at the newly created Catholic University of Louvain on 10 April 1835.
When he started this work in 1845, the cycle was entirely unknown. It was known that the digestive tract of certain animals contains certain taenias, and the presence of cysticerci in other forms was also known, but no relation had been established between these forms, which were considered to be distinct and autonomous organisms, the products of a spontaneous generation in the tissues of their hosts. Taenias were considered to be hypertrophied intestinal villi.
Dujardin had already noticed a similarity between the heads of certain cysticerci of the liver of bony fishes and the head of Tetrarhynchus living in the gut of cartilaginous fishes that fed on bony fishes. From an extensive study of the contents of the digestive tracts of a large number of fishes, Van Beneden concluded, in January 1849, that a cysticercus is an incomplete taenioid. Siebold adopted this view in 1850, and the following year Küchenmeister demonstrated experimentally that Cysticercus cellulosae from a rabbit’s peritoneum, fed to a dog, becomes Taenia serrata.
Since the Parisian zoologist Valenciennes refused to accept his theory, Van Beneden left for Paris on 22 April 1858 with four dogs, one of which had been fed thirty-two cysticercus; another, seventy; and the other two, none. In Paris he met Milne-Edwards and Quatrefages in Valenciennes’s laboratory; he predicted which dogs would contain the taenias and confirmed his predictions by autopsy.
In 1853 the Institut de France gave an important prize to a paper by Van Beneden in the mode of development and transmission of intestinal worms. This report, published in 1858, covers a wide range of data on parasites, concerning not only cestodes and trematodes, but also nematodes, Gordiacea, and Acanthocephala. The paper ends with a masterly treatment of the systematics of worms that is based on embryology.
After 1859 Van Beneden devoted himself to the study of Cetacea, both living and fossil. In 1878 he determined that the first fossil skeleton discovered in the coal mine of Bernissart belonged to the genus Iguanodon. During the last years of his life, Van Beneden devoted his efforts to new studies on parasites.
Van Beneden was always a devout and convinced adherent of the Catholic Church.
Pierre-Joseph van Beneden was a naturalist whose curiosity extended to the broadest spectrum of animal species.
Van Beneden was a foreign member of the Royal Society (1875) and also of the Linnæan, Geological, and Zoological Societies of London. In 1884 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.