René Louiche Desfontaines
French botanist (1750-1833)
René Louiche Desfontaines (French pronunciation: [ʁəne lwiʃ defɔ̃tɛn]; 14 February 1750 – 16 November 1833) was a French botanist.
Biography
Desfontaines was born near Tremblay in Brittany. He attended the Collège de Rennes and in 1773 went to Paris to study medicine. His interest in botany originated from lectures at the Jardin des Plantes given by Louis Guillaume Lemonnier. He excelled in his new interest and was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1783. He was also a member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine.
Desfontaines spent two years in Tunisia and Algeria, returning with a large collection of plants. He wrote Flora Atlantica (1798–1799, 2 vols), which included 300 genera new to science.
In addition, he worked also on ornithology, and presented the findings of his expeditions to Africa for one of the Memoires de L'Académie Royale des Sciences. Although the Mémoire corresponds to the year 1787, it was not published until 1789 by L'Imprimerie Royal as part of the Histoire de L'Académie Royale de Sciences.
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This entry incorporates text from “René Louiche Desfontaines” 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.