Obituary J^otices. 
XXI 
Alphonse Louis Pierre Pyramus de Candolle. 
By Professor Frederick O. Bower, F.R.S. 
(Read February 19, 1894.) 
It has happened not uncommonly in the science of Botany that 
more than one generation of a family has followed the same pursuit. 
The subject of this notice was the second notable botanist of his 
name, and he leaves a son who also pursues the same science. 
Augustin Pyrame de Candolle, the father of Alphonse, sprang 
from a Provengal family, which had fled from Prance in 1558 
to escape religious persecution, and had settled in Geneva. He 
appears to have spent his earlier years in Paris, where he was 
intimate with the leading men of science ; subsequently he held 
the chair of botany at Montpellier; but in 1814 he finally took up 
his residence at Geneva, having been appointed to the chair of 
botany in his native city. Himself a man of surprising powers of 
application, he set on foot that great work of descriptive botany, 
the Prodromus Systematis Naturalis, in which it was intended 
that all known plants should be arranged according to a natural 
system, and described at length. It was into this great enterprise 
that Alphonse de Candolle entered in early manhood, and at a 
time when his father was still actively at its head. It was to this 
that he devoted a great part of his long and strenuous life ; at his 
death the great work remains still incomplete, though a wonderful 
monument of the capacity and endurance of two generations. 
Born at Paris in 1806, Alphonse was still a small child when his 
father settled at Geneva. It might have seemed natural that, after 
the ordinary period of general education, he should, as the only son, 
take up the subject pursued by his father; but the latter, wishing 
him to enter a profession of more certain profit, directed him to the 
study of law, in which he graduated in 1829. But he had already 
in 1824 begun the long series of his botanical publications, which 
was continued till 1893 ; his inclinations seem plainly to have been 
towards the study of the laws of nature rather than of man, and. 
