Augustin Pyramus de Candolle facts for kids

Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (born February 4, 1778 – died September 9, 1841) was an important Swiss botanist. He became famous for studying plants. A botanist named René Louiche Desfontaines helped him start his career.

Within a few years, de Candolle discovered a new group of plants. He then went on to describe hundreds of plant families. He also created a new way to classify plants. Even though he mostly studied plants, he also worked in related areas. These included phytogeography (plant geography), agronomy (crop science), and paleontology (study of fossils).

De Candolle came up with the idea of "Nature's war." This idea later influenced Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection. De Candolle also noticed that some plants develop similar features even if they don't share a common ancestor. This is now called convergent evolution. He also observed that plant leaves move in a cycle of about 24 hours, even in constant light. This suggested that plants have an internal biological clock. Many scientists doubted this at first, but later experiments proved him right.

De Candolle's family continued his work. His son, Alphonse, and grandson, Casimir de Candolle, helped with a huge plant catalog. This catalog, called Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis, was started by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle himself.

Early Life and Education

Augustin Pyramus de Candolle was born on February 4, 1778, in Geneva, which was then the Republic of Geneva. His father, Augustin de Candolle, was a former official. His family had moved to Geneva from France to escape religious persecution.

When he was seven, de Candolle became very ill with hydrocephalus. This affected his childhood a lot. Despite this, he was a very bright student. He quickly learned about literature and was good at writing poetry. In 1794, he started studying science at the Collège de Genève. There, he learned from Jean Pierre Étienne Vaucher. Vaucher later inspired de Candolle to make botany his main life goal.

Career in Botany

De Candolle studied science and law for four years at the Geneva Academy. In 1798, he moved to Paris. His career in botany officially began when René Louiche Desfontaines helped him get a job. He worked in the herbarium (a collection of dried plants) of Charles Louis L'Héritier de Brutelle. This job helped his reputation and he learned a lot from Desfontaines. De Candolle discovered his first new plant group, Senebiera, in 1799.

His first books, Plantarum historia succulentarum (1799) and Astragalogia (1802), caught the attention of famous scientists like Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. De Candolle worked as a deputy at the Collège de France in 1802. Lamarck also asked him to publish the third edition of the Flore française (1805–1815). In this book, de Candolle suggested a new, natural way to classify plants. This was different from the older, artificial method by Carl Linnaeus. De Candolle believed that plant groups are distinct, not just a straight line.

In 1804, de Candolle published a book about the medical uses of plants. He also earned a medical degree in Paris. Two years later, he published Synopsis plantarum in flora Gallica descriptarum. For the next six summers, he traveled across France. He was doing a survey of plants and agriculture for the French government. This work was published in 1813. In 1807, he became a professor of botany at the University of Montpellier. He later became the first head of botany there in 1810. His classes were very popular, with 200–300 students attending field trips that started at 5:00 am and ended at 7:00 pm!

While in Montpellier, de Candolle published his Théorie élémentaire de la botanique (1813). This book introduced his new classification system. It also introduced the word taxonomy, which is the science of classifying living things. In 1816, Candolle moved back to Geneva. The next year, he was asked to lead the new natural history department there.

The de Candolle family home in Geneva

De Candolle spent the rest of his life trying to improve and complete his natural plant classification system. He started a huge project called Regni vegetabillis systema naturale. But it was too big to finish. So, he started a smaller, but still massive, project called Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis in 1824. He only finished seven volumes, which was about two-thirds of the whole work. Still, he described over one hundred plant families. This helped create the foundation of modern botany. Besides botany, he also worked on plant geography, crop science, and the study of plant fossils.

Later Life

Augustin de Candolle was the first of four generations of botanists in his family. He married Mademoiselle Torras. His son, Alphonse Pyramus de Candolle, took over his father's botany position. He also continued the Prodromus project. Casimir de Candolle, Augustin's grandson, also helped with the Prodromus. He did detailed research on the plant family Piperaceae. Augustin's great-grandson, Richard Émile Augustin de Candolle, was also a botanist. Augustin de Candolle died on September 9, 1841, in Geneva, after being sick for many years.

In 2017, a book was written in French about his life. It also covered one of his greatest achievements, the Botanical Garden of Geneva.

Legacy

He is remembered in the names of plant groups like Candollea and Candolleodendron. Several plant species, such as Eugenia candolleana and Diospyros candolleana, are also named after him. Even a mushroom, Psathyrella candolleana, carries his name. Candollea, a science journal about plant classification, is named after him and his family. He also guided other botanists, like Jean-Louis Berlandier and Marie-Anne Libert.

De Candolle also had an unexpected impact on mail! A long speech he gave in 1843 led to Geneva adopting pre-paid postage. This resulted in Switzerland's second postage stamp, the famous Double Geneva.

Plant Classification System

De Candolle was the first to talk about "Nature's war." He wrote about plants being "at war one with another." This meant different species fighting for space and resources. Charles Darwin studied de Candolle's "natural system" of classification in 1826. Later, in 1838, Darwin thought about "the warring of the species." He realized this idea, combined with Thomas Malthus's work, led to the pressures he called natural selection. In 1839, de Candolle visited Britain. Darwin invited him to dinner, and they discussed these important ideas.

De Candolle was also one of the first to see the difference between how plant parts look (morphology) and what they do (physiology). He said that plant shape was about the number of parts and their positions. It was not about what they did. This made him the first to try to explain why plant parts have certain shapes and numbers. He also introduced the idea of homology. This helped explain how similar parts in different plants could show an evolutionary connection.

Biological Clocks

De Candolle also helped the field of chronobiology, which is the study of biological rhythms. Other scientists had already studied how plant leaves move in daily cycles. In 1832, de Candolle observed the plant Mimosa pudica. He noticed that its leaves opened and closed in about 22–23 hours, even in constant light. This was shorter than the Earth's 24-hour day-night cycle. He thought that a different, internal clock must be controlling this rhythm. This meant the clock was endogenous, or coming from inside the plant.

Many scientists still looked for an outside factor that controlled these rhythms. But in the mid-1920s, Erwin Bunning repeated Candolle's experiments and found the same results. Later studies in places like the South Pole and in space labs further proved that these internal biological clocks exist, even without outside cues.

Published Works

• Reticularia rosea (1798)
• Historia Plantarum Succulentarum (4 volumes, 1799)
• Astragalogia (1802)
• Flore française (1805–1815)
  • Introduction: Principes élémentaires de botanique p. 61
• Essai sur les propriétés médicales des plantes comparées avec leurs formes extérieures et leur classification naturelle (1804)
• Synopsis plantarum in flora Gallica descriptarum (1806)
• Mémoire sur la Géographie des Plantes de France, Considerée dans Ses Rapports avec la Hauteur Absolue (1817)
• Flore du Mexique (1819)
• Essai Élémentaire de Géographie Botanique (1820)
• A. P. de Candolle and K. Sprengel. Elements of the philosophy of plants: containing the principles of scientific botany. W. Blackwood, Edinburgh,1821.
• Regni vegetabillis systema naturale (First two volumes, 1818–1821)
• Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis (First seven volumes 1824–1839, continued by Alphonse Pyramus de Candolle)

See Also

In Spanish: Augustin Pyrame de Candolle para niños

• Category:Taxa named by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle