APPENDIX. 341 



works of Buffon, sec VEloge historique, by Cuvier, and 

 the work of M. Flourens, to which we have already re- 

 ferred.) 



NOTE XII. 



The Jardin des Plantes and the Academie Francaise 

 were both founded by a royal decree in 1635. Guyde la 

 Brosse, who was physician to Louis XIIL, and at whose 

 suggestion the garden had been established, was ap- 

 pointed its first superintendent. 



The garden was established for an entirely utilitarian 

 purpose, as is implied by its original name of Le Jardin 

 des Plantes Medicinales. It had already begun to 

 assume a more developed form and a more scientific cha- 

 racter under the management of the celebrated Fagon 

 first physician to Louis XIV., who in 1683 resigned 

 the functions of Professor of Botany in favour of 

 Tournefort.* Although the garden was much neglected 

 by the successors of Fagon, it revived under the director- 



* Tournefort, who was born at Aix in 1656, and died at Paris in 

 1708, had devoted himself to botany from his childhood, and before 

 he left college he was already well acquainted with all the plants of 

 Provence. To increase his botanical knowledge, he made succes- 

 sive tours to the Alps, the Pyrenees, and Catalonia ; and, being called 

 to Paris by Fagon, he devoted all his leisure time to botanical excur- 

 sions, and thus successively visited Spain, Portugal, England, and 

 Holland. After being elected member of the Academy of Sciences, 

 he published in 1694 his Elements de Botanique, which marks an 

 epoch in science by the progress it made in the classification, and 

 more especially in the determination of genera. The reputation 

 which this work gained for him, facilitated the accomplishment of a 

 more important journey than any he had made on his own resources ; 

 for, on the instigation of the Academy, he received from the Go- 

 vernment a special mission to visit the Levant. He published the 

 scientific narrative of this expedition, together with several other 

 memoirs. 



7. 3 



