Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent
French naturalist, geographer and officer (1778-1846)
Jean-Baptiste Geneviève Marcellin Bory de Saint-Vincent was a French naturalist, army officer and politician. He was born on 6 July 1778 in Agen (Lot-et-Garonne) and died on 22 December 1846 in Paris. Biologist and geographer, he was particularly interested in volcanology, systematics and botany. The standard author abbreviation Bory is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Life
Youth
Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint Vincent was born at Agen on 6 July 1778. His parents were Géraud Bory de Saint-Vincent and Madeleine de Journu; his father's family were petty nobility who played important roles at the bar and in the judiciary, during and after the French Revolution. Instilled with sentiments hostile to the revolution from childhood, he studied first at the college of Agen, then with his uncle Journu-Auber in Bordeaux in 1787. He may have attended courses in medicine and surgery from 1791 to 1793. During the Reign of Terror in 1793, his family was persecuted and took refuge in the Landes.
In 1794, as a precocious naturalist, aged 15, Bory was instrumental in freeing from prison the entomologist Pierre André Latreille, whose early work he had read, and in saving Latreille from deportation to the penal colony of Cayenne.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent” 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.