THE 



EDINBURGH NEW 

 PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNAL. 



Historical Eloge of Antoine-Laurent Jussieu* By M. Flourens, 

 Perpetual Secretai-y of the Academy of Sciences of France. 



The family of Jussieu proceeded originally from the small 

 town of Montrotier, situated in the midst of the mountains of 

 the Lyonnais . One of the memb er s of this family went to Lyons 

 about the year 1680, and established himself as an apothecary. 

 He married there, and was the father of sixteen children, three 

 of whom, Antoine, Bernard, and Joseph de Jussieu, became three 

 of the most distingiiished botanists of the eighteenth century. 

 The oldest of this numerous and gifted family was called 

 Christophe, and he was the father of M. Laurent de Jussieu, 

 who had the honour of conferring additional celebrity upon 

 the name his uncles had left him, and the felicity, not less 

 rare, of handing it down to a successor who maintains its re- 

 no-svn. In this family a taste for botany seems, for nearly 

 two centuries, to have been hereditary, in the same way as a 

 mathematical genius has, for nearly the same period, charac- 

 terized the family of Bernouilli. 



Antoine de Jussieu, who commenced the celebrated career 

 of the family, was a botanist almost from his infancy ; at the 

 age of fourteen, making excm-sions in the neighbovirhood of 

 Lyons, and throughout the surrounding provinces. At the 

 age of eighteen he went to Montpellier, where he studied 

 under Magnol, who introduced the term families, — a very 

 happy expression, though at first little understood, for the af- 

 finities, and, we may say, the parentage of plants. At the 

 age of twenty-four he succeeded to Tovu-nefort, the greatest 

 botanist of his own age, or, perhaps, of any other time ; for 

 he was the first to establish the fundamental principles of the 



* Read before the Academy, August 1838. 



VOL. XXVII. NO. Liir. — JiLY 1839. ■^ 



