A. P. de Candolle

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Image:Candolle Augustin Pyrame de 1778-1841.jpg

A. P. de Candolle (February 4, 1778 - September 9, 1841) was one of the great botanists of all time. There is quite a bit of confusion about his exact name, caused in no small part by the fact that he used different spellings in the various books he authored. The spelling listed by IPNI is "Augustin Pyramus de Candolle". The author abbreviation used in citing plant names he published is "DC.".

He was descended from one of the ancient families of the Provence, but was, born in Geneva, as religious persecution had forced his ancestors to leave their native country in the middle of the 16th century.

Though a sickly boy he showed great aptitude for study, and distinguished himself at school by his rapid attainments in classical and general literature, and specially by a faculty for writing elegant verse. He began his scientific studies at the college of Geneva, where the teaching of J. P. E. Vaucher first inspired him with the determination to make botanical science the chief pursuit of his life. In 1796 he moved to Paris. His first productions, Plantarum historia succulentarum (4 vols., 1799) and Astragalogia (1802), brought him to the notice of Georges Cuvier, for whom he acted as deputy at the College de France in 1802, and of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who afterwards entrusted him with the publication of the third edition of the Flore française (1803-1815). The "Principes élémentaires de botanique", printed as the introduction to this work, contained the first exposition of his principles of classification, following a natural method as opposed to the artificial, Linnaean method.

In 1804 he was granted the degree of doctor of medicine by the medical faculty of Paris, and published his Essai sur les propriétés médicales des plantes, and soon after, in 1806, his Synopsis plantarum in flora Gallica descriptarum. At the request of the French government he spent the summers of the following six years in making a botanical and agricultural survey of the entire country, the results of which were published in 1813. In 1807 he was appointed professor of botany in the medical faculty of the university of Montpellier, to transfer in 1810 to the newly founded chair of botany in the faculty of sciences in the same university.

From Montpellier, where he published his Théorie élémentaire de la botanique (Elementary Theory of Botany, 1813), he moved to Geneva in 1816 and in the following year was invited by the (again independent) Swiss government to fill the newly created chair of natural history. The rest of his life was spent in an attempt to elaborate and complete his natural system of botanical classification. The results of his labours were initially published in his Regni vegetabilis systema naturale, but only two volumes were completed (1821) when he found that it would be impossible for him to complete this, at the chosen, extensive scale. Accordingly, in 1824 he began a less extensive work of the same kind, the Prodromus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis, but even of this he was able to finish only seven volumes, or two-thirds of the whole. He had been in delicate health for several years when he died at Geneva.

His son was Alphonse de Candolle (1806-1893), who eventually succeeded to his father's chair and continued the Prodromus.