Michel AdansonBorn 7 Apr 1727; died 3 Aug 1806 at age 79.French botanist who established natural classification as a fundamental aim of biology. From 1748 he spent five years exploring Senegal, where he not only described and collected its flora and fauna, but also collected objects of commerce, drew maps, made meteorological and astronomical observations, and studied the languages. He classified the mollusks in an original way: by the anatomical structure of the living animals within the shells. The number and diversity of tropical plants in Senegal led him to consider grouping plants based on all their physical characteristics (rather than a few arbitrarily selected ones), with an emphasis on families. In 1763, he published his sytem in Familles des Plantes. The baobob tree is known by the genus Adansonia.« |
