Alphonse Pyramus de Candolle
Swiss botanist (1806-1893)
Alphonse Louis Pierre Pyramus (or Pyrame) de Candolle (27 October 1806 – 4 April 1893) was a French-Swiss botanist, the son of the Swiss botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle.
Biography
De Candolle, son of Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, first devoted himself to the study of law, but gradually drifted to botany and finally succeeded to his father's chair at the University of Geneva. He published a number of botanical works, including continuations of the Prodromus in collaboration with his son, Casimir de Candolle. Among his other contributions is the formulation, based on his father's work for the Prodromus, of the first Laws of Botanical Nomenclature, which was adopted by the International Botanical Congress in 1867, and was the prototype of the current ICN.
He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1859 and was awarded the Linnean Medal of the Linnean Society of London in 1889. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1878.
He is also known for a study of the religious affiliations of foreign members of the French and British Academies of Science during the Scientific Revolution that demonstrated that in both academies Protestants were more heavily represented than Catholics by comparison with catchment populations. This observation continues to be used (for example in David Landes' 1999 Wealth and Poverty of Nations, cf. revised paperback edition, 177) as a demonstration that Protestants were more inclined to be scientifically active during the Scientific Revolution than Roman Catholics.
In 1855 de Candolle published Géographie botanique raisonnée. This was a ground-breaking book that for the first time brought together the large mass of data being collected by the expeditions of the time.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alphonse Pyramus de Candolle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.