Michel Adanson
| Michel Adanson | |
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Michel Adanson
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| Born | 7 April 1727 Aix-en-Provence |
| Died | 3 August 1806 (aged 79) |
| Nationality | French |
| Fields | Naturalist |
| Institutions | Jardin des Plantes. |
| Author abbrev. (botany) | Adans. |
Michel Adanson (7 April 1727 – 3 August 1806) was an 18th-century French botanist and naturalist, of Scottish descent.
Adanson was born at Aix-en-Provence. His family moved to Paris on 1730. After leaving the Collège Sainte-Barbe he was employed in the cabinets of R. A. F. Réaumur and Bernard de Jussieu, as well as in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris. He attended lectures at the Jardin du Roi and the Collège Royal in Paris from 1741 to 1746. At the end of 1748, funded by a director of the Compagnie des Indes, he left France on an exploring expedition to Senegal. He remained there for five years, collecting and describing numerous animals and plants. He also collected specimens of every object of commerce, delineated maps of the country, made systematic meteorological and astronomical observations, and prepared grammars and dictionaries of the languages spoken on the banks of the Sénégal.
After his return to Paris in 1754 he made use of a small portion of the materials he had collected in his Histoire naturelle du Senegal (1757). Sales of the work were slow, and after the publisher’s bankruptcy and the reimbursement to subscribers, Adanson estimated the cost of the book to him had been 5,000 livres, beginning the penury in which he lived the rest of his life. This work has a special interest from the essay on shells, printed at the end of it, where Adanson proposed his universal method, a system of classification distinct from those of Buffon and Linnaeus. He founded his classification of all organized beings on the consideration of each individual organ. As each organ gave birth to new relations, so he established a corresponding number of arbitrary arrangements. Those beings possessing the greatest number of similar organs were referred to one great division, and the relationship was considered more remote in proportion to the dissimilarity of organs.
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