Candolle, Augustin

Candolle, Augustin (Pyrame de)

(born Feb. 4, 1778, Geneva, Switz.—died Sept. 9, 1841, Geneva) Swiss botanist. In Paris (from 1796) he became an assistant to Georges Cuvier and worked with Lamarck on revising his botanical works. He carried out a government-commissioned botanical and agricultural survey of France (1806–12). In 1813 he published his most important work, Théorie élémentaire de la botanique, in which he contended that plant anatomy, not physiology, must be the basis of classification, for which he coined the term taxonomy. He introduced the concept of homologous parts for plants (following Cuvier's work on animals). From 1817 until his death he taught at the University of Geneva. He outlined systematic laws of botanical nomenclature (1818–21); his taxonomy suffered from certain weaknesses, but he achieved extensive subdivision of flowering plants, describing 161 families of dicotyledons, and his system supplanted that of Carolus Linnaeus. He completed seven volumes of a descriptive classification of all known seed plants (from 1824).