Jacob Gijsbertus Samuël van Breda

Jacob Gijsbertus Samuël van Breda (Delft, 24 October 1788 – Haarlem, 2 September 1867) was a Dutch biologist and geologist.

Jacob was the son of Jacob van Breda, a Dutch physician, physicist and politician, and Anna Elsenera van Campen. His mother died when he was two years old. He studied medicine and physics at the University of Leyden, where he obtained his degree in medicine and philosophy in 1811, afterwards he travelled to Paris. In 1816 he became professor of botany, chemistry and pharmacy at the University of Franeker. In this period he benefitted from the newly peaceful conditions in Europe by visiting places of scientific interest to him, e.g. in Germany.

At Franeker he became close personal friends with one of the curators, the Dutch lawyer, administrator and politician Squire Adriaan Gillis Camper, himself the son of professor of anatomy Petrus Camper. On 9 May 1821 he married in Klein Lankum with Camper's third child and second daughter Frederika Theodora Ernestina Camper (1799-1834), who was herself an amateur-scientist who accompanied him on voyages to Georges Cuvier in France and Humphry Davy in England; she made drawings of his specimens. All children from their marriage would be stillborn.

In 1822, Van Breda became professor of botany, zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Ghent. Here he was head of the local hortus botanicus and in 1825 commenced a major botanical work, the Genera et Species Orchidearum et Asclepiadearum, in fifteen tomes describing plant genera from the Dutch Indies shipped to him from Batavia; but he had to abandon this project and his position in 1830 because of the Belgian Revolution. In 1825 he had also written a biography of his deceased father-in-law: Levens-schets van Adriaan Gilles Camper.

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