142 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. II. No. 33. 



far from being completed, and in the last 

 ten years of his life he produced many of 

 his most important works. It is not always 

 safe to judge an author by the number of 

 titles that his bibliogrophy contains, but for 

 an author all of whose contributions are 

 certain to be of value to science this cri- 

 terion has considerable weight. I have 

 been able to collect together about 150 titles 

 of Saporta's works, several of which are 

 volumes elaboratelj' illustrated, and two of 

 which consist of long series of exhaustive 

 and painstaking papers. 



I shall attempt here to mention only a 

 few of the leading subjects to which the 

 Marquis Sapoi-ta devoted his energies. 

 He was born at St. Zachai-ie, Department 

 of Var, in the South of France, on the 

 28th of July, 1823, and christened Louis 

 Charles Joseph Gaston. As his name indi- 

 cates, he was of Spanish descent and be- 

 longed to one of the oldest families of the 

 nobiUty of that countrj' that are so fre- 

 quentlj' met with in this part of France. 

 We are informed by his illustrious co- 

 worker, M. R. Zeiller,* that he was in more 

 or less direct communication during his 

 boyhood with the eminent entomologist, 

 Boj'er de Fonscolombe, his maternal grand- 

 father, and that his own father also culti- 

 vated entomology to some extent. This 

 may have tended to inspire in him a taste 

 at least for scientific studj-. But this ata- 

 vistic taste did not develop in earty life, 

 and j)rior to the age of 30 he devoted him- 

 self chieflj' to literature and history. At 

 about that time he was accidentallj' brought 

 into relations with the founder of paleo- 

 botany, M. Adolphe Brongniart, who had 

 been interested in certain fossil plants from 

 Tertiary beds near Saporta's home at Aix 

 and from Mauosque. This appears to have 

 given the special bent to his mind which de- 

 termined the labor of the rest of his life, and 



* Eevue gouorale des scieuoe, 15 a^Til, Paris, 1895, 

 p. 359. 



thenceforward to the time of his death he 

 devoted himself unceasingly to the study of 

 fossil plants, and largely to those rich fossil 

 floras which he has made known in Provence. 

 A letter which he wrote to M. Charles Th. 

 Gaudin, and which the latter published in 

 the 6th volume of the ' Bulletin de la societe 

 Vaudoise des sciences naturelles ' for April 

 IS, 1860, shows clearly that he had already 

 at that date been a long time engaged in the 

 collection and study of the fossil plants of 

 Provence, but this seems to have been his 

 earliest contribution on the subject of fossil 

 plants. These alreadj^ rather full notes 

 were greatlj^ expanded and published the 

 following year in Gaudin's translation of 

 Heer's Eesearches on the ' Climate and Veg- 

 etation of the Tertiary,' which forms a part 

 of the 3d volume of Heer's ' Tertiary Flora 

 of Switzerland,' the French translation be- 

 ing published sej)aratel}'.* 



These papers were merely preliminary to 

 the extensive series which began to appear 

 the next year, viz., his ' Etudes sur la vege- 

 tation du sud-est de la France k I'epoque 

 tertiaire.' This series was published in the 

 'Annales des sciences naturelles, botanique,' 

 beginning with the 16th volume of the 4th 

 series, 1862, and concluding with the 9th 

 volume of the 5th series, 1868, and embrac- 

 ing 13 distinct papers, all profusely illus- 

 trated by beautifullj^ prepared lithographic 

 plates. Four years later he made a com- 

 plete revision of this work in three similar 

 papers which appeared in the 15th, 17th and 

 18th volumes of the same serial, 1872-1873. 

 In 1888 he returned to this subject and 

 published his ' Dernieres adjonctions ' in 

 two papers in the 7tli and 10th volumes of 

 the 7th series of the same work. In this 

 exhaustive treatise the Tertiary flora of the 



* Eecherches sur le climat et la vegetation du pays 

 tertiaire, par Oswald Heer, traduction de Charles Tli. 

 Gaudin, "Winterthur, 1861. B. Exameu des flores 

 tertiares de Provence i)ar M. Gaston de Saporta, pp. 

 133-171. 



