Candolle, Augustin Pyrame De (redirected from Augustin de Candolle)

Candolle, Augustin Pyrame De 

Born Feb. 4, 1778, in Geneva; died there Sept. 9, 1841. Swiss botanist. Student of G. Cuvier and J. Lamarck.

Candolle was coauthor of the completely revised third edition of Flora of France (1803-15). He was a professor at the universities of Paris (from 1802), Montpellier (from 1808), and Geneva (from 1816). In Geneva he founded the Botanical Gardens and the De Candolle Herbarium. He developed one of the first natural systems for the classification of plants and began publishing a compendium of all known varieties of angiosperms: Introduction to the Natural System of the Plant Kingdom (vols. 1-7, 1824-39; completed by his son Alphonse de Candolle). Candolle founded comparative plant morphology and introduced the concept of the plan of symmetry. He distinguished the similarity of organs according to their functions (analogy) and according to their structural pattern (homology) and extended the principle of correlation to plants.

WORKS

Théorie élémentaire de la botanique, 3rd ed. Paris, 1844.
Organographie végétale, vols. 1-2. Paris, 1827.
Prodromus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis, vols. 1-22. Paris, 1824-73.

REFERENCE

Briquet, J. Biographies des botanistes à Genève de 1500 à 1931. Geneva, 1940. Pages 114-30. (With bibliography.)

D. B. LEBEDEV