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xiii+337 pages with folding map. Octavo (8 1/4" x 5 1/2") bound in full leather with five raised spine bands with gilt lettering. Translated from the French with notes by an English Gentleman, who resided some time in that country. First English edition.
French botanist, Michel Adanson was the son of the equerry to the Archbishop of Aix-en Provence. At college he demonstrated an extraordinary aptitude and passion for the natural sciences and afterwards went on to study and work under the direction of Raumur and Bernard de Jussieu. While he was cataloging the plants that had been grown in the Jardin du Roi since 1740, he began to play with the idea of a classification system capable of describing all living plants.
For five years (December 1748 to February 1754), he charted maps, collected artifacts, made astronomical and meteorological observations, and wrote grammars and dictionaries of some of the languages. Mostly, however, he collected specimens. He brought back to Paris some 30,000 plant specimens and a large collection of mollusks and fish. In addition to studying the natural history of St Louis and its surroundings, he made several journeys to the interior, including trips to Gore Island, Podor, and the Gambia River.
Only the first volume of his planned Histoire Naturelle du Sanegale (Paris, 1757) was ever published. It contains an account of his travels, followed by a description of shells, but few mentions of plants, because he was reserving his botanical discoveries for future volumes.
For his descriptions of Senegalese mollusks he applied an entirely new method of classification that was based on the anatomy of the living animals inside the shells rather than on the shells alone. Many of his genera are still in use today. In 1759, while working with the Jussieus on a manuscript plan for the gardens at Versailles, he completed his outline for the plant classification system that he had originally conceived as a student in the Jardin du Roi. Familles Naturelles des Plantes, published in 1763, owed much to the classification of plant families developed by Bernard de Jussieu for the flower beds at the Grand Trianon, and was inspired by the system of Joseph du Pitton de Tournefort and by the empirical approach of John Ray.
In 1775 he convened the Academy to present his outline of L'Ordre universel de la nature. The committee of inspection balked at the piles of material: 27 manuscript volumes explaining the relations and distribution of all known beings and substances; 150 manuscript volumes listing 40,000 species in alphabetical order; a vocabulary of 200,000 words; 40,000 illustrations; 24,168 specimens; and scores of memoirs and observations. The committee, in their rejection of the proposal, advised him to separate his own work from what was merely compilation. Adanson, however, remained convinced of the superiority of his project and spent the rest of his life in futile attempts to have his encyclopaedia published, revising and developing its various parts, expanding the supporting herbarium and illustrations. The French Revolution ruined him financially, but not politically. With the dissolution of the Academy he lost the pension that had been granted to him when his natural history collection was absorbed into the Cabinet du Roi. But he did not allow his poverty to interrupt his work. When the newly reconstituted French Institute invited him to take his place among his old colleagues, he sent the reply that he had no shoes in which to appear before them, although visitors to his cabinet knew that he always found the money for fresh supplies of paper and ink. At length the French Institute renewed his pension and Napoleon made him a member of the Legion dehonneur .
Condition: Recased with new spine, corners rubbed, some darkening to preliminaries, smal book plate on front paste down, some chipping to covers else good copy, internally very good.
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