48 HISTORICAL EULOGIUM 



Christopher ; from him descended M. Laurent de Jussieu, 

 who was destined to have the happiness of adding new credit 

 to the name which his father and uncles had transmitted to 

 him, and the no less rare felicity of handing it to a successor 

 adapted to support its honour ; a family in which the genius 

 of Botany seems to have been hereditary for now nearly two 

 centuries, as was the spirit of mathematics during a long 

 series of years in that of Bernouilli. 



Antoine de Jussieu, with whom commenced the celebrity of 

 the name and the taste for Botany, was a Botanist almost 

 from his infancy. Before he attained to fourteen years of 

 age, he had investigated while herborizing, the envii'ons of 

 Lyons and the adjoining provinces of the Lyonnais. At 

 eighteen, he studied in Montpellier under Magnol, who was 

 already proposing tbe names of Families, (a happy term, 

 though then little understood,) o^ Affinities, and (so to speak) 

 of Parentages of Plants, and at twenty-four, he succeeded to 

 Tournefort, the greatest botanist of his own time, and per- 

 haps of any time, because it was he who first fixed the con- 

 stitual ideas of the science of Botany, as Linnaeus, at a later 

 period, settled its nomenclature. 



Compelled to devote himself to the practice of medicine in 

 which he excelled, Antoine did not continue to effect for 

 Botany all that his facile and singularly precocious genius 

 had seemed to promise. But in summoning to him his 

 second brother Bernard, he did more for this science than 

 his own entire and undivided attention could probably have 

 performed. 



After Bernard, he sent for Joseph, whose life was to be as 

 perturbed as his brother's should be calm, and who set off for 

 Peru in 1735. He accompanied in his capacity of botanist, 

 the astronomers whom the Academy was then sending, that 

 they might measure at the equator a degree of the meridian, 

 and thus resolve by definitive experiment, the famous and 

 long-debated question of the configuration of the earth. 

 Joseph is an additional example of ail the courage and 

 patience which is inspired by devotion to science, wbicii 



