Michel Adanson

Botanist, born in Aix-en-Provence, SE France, the first exponent of classification of plants into natural orders, before Linnaeus. His works include Les Familles naturelles des plantes (1763, Natural Families of Plants). The baobab genus of African trees, Adansonia, is named after him.

Michel Adanson (April 7, 1727 - August 3, 1806) was a French naturalist of Scottish descent.

Adanson was born at Aix-en-Provence.

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). 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. 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.

In 1763 he published his Familles naturelles des plantes. In this work he developed the principle of arrangement above mentioned, which, in its adherence to natural botanical relations, was based on the system of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, and had been anticipated to some extent nearly a century before by John Ray. The success of this work was hindered by its innovations in the use of terms, which were ridiculed by the defenders of the popular sexual system of Linnaeus; but it did much to open the way for the establishment, by means principally of Antoine Laurent de Jussieu's Genera Plantarum (1789), of the natural method of the classification of plants.

In 1774 Adanson submitted to the consideration of the French Academy of Sciences an immense work, extending to all known beings and substances. The committee to which the inspection of this enormous mass was entrusted strongly recommended Adanson to separate and publish all that was peculiarly his own, leaving out what was merely compilation. and the huge work, at which he continued to labour, was never published.

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.

He died at Paris after months of severe suffering, 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 Georges Cuvier, "of the more durable monument which he has erected to himself in his works."

Besides the books already mentioned he published papers on the ship-worm, the baobab tree, the Adansonia digitata of Carolus Linnaeus, the origin of the varieties of cultivated plants, and gum-producing trees.