THE 



AMERICAN 

 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE, &c. 



Art. I. — A Notice of Prof. Augustine Pyrame De Candolle ; by 

 George B, Emerson, Pres. of the Boston Soc. of Nat. Hist. 



At a meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History, held in 

 their hall, Nov. .I7th, 1841, the President read portions of a letter 

 from his friend, Edward Tuckerman, Jr., containing, together 

 with many interesting facts relating to the botanists of England 

 and France, the melancholy intelligence of the death of De Can- 

 dolle. After reading this letter, the President went on to say: 



Thus has set one of the great lights of botany — a man, who, 

 for the vastness of his works and the comprehensive idea he had 

 formed of the extent and ends of the science, has not left his 

 superior, hardly his peer. May I be allowed to take this occasion 

 to say a few words upon the works and character, as a botanist, . 

 of the man whose loss we are thus called to deplore. 



Augustine Pyrame De Candolle was born in Geneva in 1778, 

 of an ancient family, which, as long ago as the sixteenth century, 

 was distinguished in the republic of letters. From his earliest 

 years he seems to have devoted himself to botany ; for already 

 in his twenty first year, in 1798, he published his History of Suc- 

 culent Plants.* In the preface to this work he asks, in the sim- 



* Plantarum Historia Succulentarum, published in Paris by Dugour and Durand, 

 in two folio volumes with colored plates. This contains descriptions of succulent 

 plants, not of any one natural order, but of those having sufficient resemblance to 

 be associated. They are mostly of the orders Crassnlaceee, Ficoideae, and Cacta- 

 cese, with some species of aloes, and a few others. They are precisely those 

 plants of which it is important to have good figures, as of most of them it is nearly 



Vol. xLii, No. 2.— Jan. -March, 1842. 28 



