Jean-Baptiste van Mons

Jean-Baptiste van Mons

Jean-Baptiste Ferdinand Antoine Joseph van Mons (born November 11, 1765 in Brussels , † September 6, 1842 in Leuven ) was a Belgian physicist, chemist, botanist, gardener and pomologist , and 1817-1830 in Leuven professor of chemistry and agricultural sciences.

Life

Portrait of Jean-Baptiste van Mons

Jean-Baptiste van Mons was born in Brussels in 1765 as the second eldest son of Ferdinand-Philippe van Mons (1719–1794) and his wife Marie Catherine Josèphe nee Colins (1733–1798). He had four brothers and a sister and grew up in poor circumstances, so that he had to start an apprenticeship as a pharmacist at an early age.

On August 16, 1792 van Mons married Wilhelmine-Antoinette van Coeckelberghe (* 1765 in Heusden-lez-Gand), who on August 26, 1794, three months after the birth of their first daughter Antoinette (* May 1794, † March 19, 1795 ), died.

On February 28, 1795 he married Jeanne-Agnès Dillen († 1817), with whom he had four sons:

• Louis-Ferdinand-Augustin-AJ van Mons (born February 23, 1796 in Brussels, † March 31, 1847 in Liège )
• Charles-Jacques van Mons (born February 22, 1798 in Brussels, † April 14, 1837 in Brussels), Professor of Pathology at the University of Brussels
• Théodore-François Antoine Joseph van Mons (born March 31, 1801 in Brussels, † December 30, 1869 in Schaerbeek ), court judge in Brussels
• Urbain Henri Auguste van Mons (1802-1815)

Van Mons had several personal setbacks in his life. His youngest son died in 1815 at the age of 13, and two years later he also lost his wife. This moved him to leave Brussels and take up a position at the University of Leuven. After he had to lose a large part of his tree population three times due to external circumstances and his son Charles-Jacques died in 1837, van Mons bitterly withdrew from the public and from his acquaintances and friends and increasingly neglected himself.

Van Mons died in Leuven on September 6, 1842 at the age of 76.

Professional background

Title page of the 1st edition of the Journal de Chimie et de Physique

Van Mons first completed an apprenticeship as a pharmacist and later ran a pharmacy in Brussels. In self-study he learned chemistry and at the age of 20 he wrote an essay about new findings in this field. He later had a lively professional exchange with chemists such as Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier , Antoine François de Fourcroy , Gaspard Monge and Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette .

In 1797 he was appointed professor of physics and chemistry at the central school of the Dyle department. He was editor of the journal Annales de Chimie and founded the journal Journal de chimie et de physique in 1801 . Van Mons was the first to carry out vaccinations in Belgium.

In 1807 he was promoted to Dr. med. appointed. When the Belgian Academy of Sciences was reconstituted in Brussels in 1816, he was made a member and in 1817 he was appointed professor of chemistry and agronomy at the newly founded University of Leuven . He taught here until 1836.

Van Mons was appointed Membre associé des Institut de France ( Académie des sciences ) in recognition of his scientific achievements in 1796 .

Services in the field of pomology and fruit growing

Title page of Arbres Fruitier's work

As a teenager, van Mons began to try sowing balsamines and Indian roses (hibiscus) . Around 1785, van Mons began experimenting with sowing fruit pits. Outside of Brussels, he set up the de la Fidelité tree nursery , where he raised seedlings. As early as 1815 it is said to have had around 80,000 pear seedlings. Although he was appointed professor at the University of Leuven in 1817, he initially kept his experimental garden in Brussels. In 1819 the city council of Brussels decided to build the city in the area in which van Mons was about 2 hectares of tree nursery, which is why van Mons was expropriated. At that time there were more than 50,000 trees on the site, some of which were more than 20 years old. Van Mons had to clear the site in just 6 weeks in the middle of winter, so that he was only able to relocate around 5% of the plants to new plots in Leuven, which the university made available to him. From most of the trees he was only able to gain vines.

Van Mons continued his sowing experiments in Leuven. In 1823 he had built up a stock of 50,000 trees again and published a descriptive catalog of his fruit tree stocks, which contained 1,050 pear varieties.

In 1831, French troops stationed in Leuven in support of the Kingdom of Belgium used his orchard as standing quarters, causing van Mons to lose the entire fruit harvest. In 1834 the Belgian government finally laid claim to the two largest gardens, as a luminous gas factory was to be built on the site. For van Mons this meant another great loss of trees.

In 1835/1836 van Mons published the two-volume book Arbres fruitiers: leur culture en Belqique et leur propagation par la graine: ou, Pomonomie Belge, expérimentale et raisonnée , with which he promoted the spread of his varieties and in which he developed the breeding theory of propagated successive regeneration of the fruit varieties. Van Mons assumed that fruit varieties age over several generations of vegetative reproduction and thus show a qualitative decline in performance. He drew this conclusion from the observation that the fruit quality of old pear varieties, of which trees were known during his childhood, was then better than that of the trees he cultivated. This theory was soon refuted, but continued to be taken up well into the 1940s. Today it is assumed that the performance losses observed by van Mons were probably due to the effects of the frosty winter of 1828/1829, to a virus attack or to unnoticed small mutations.

Van Mons tried to grow vigorous, well-acclimated and robust pear varieties by sowing them. To do this, he sown the seeds of a pear tree with low fruit quality over 9 generations and selected the offspring for high fruit quality. Van Mons assumed that the greater the number of generations, the maturity of a variety is brought forward and the quality of the fruit increases, and he believed that the older a fruit variety is, the more stable it is when the variety is sown. Even if these basic assumptions of his theory were later refuted by new insights into heredity and variety breeding, he drew correct conclusions from his observations at this early stage. In this way he recognized the influence of climate and soil on the development of the seedlings.

After van Mon's death, his nursery was taken over by the pomologist Alexandre Bivort, who also continued his sowing experiments.

Varieties of fruit bred or distributed by Van Mons

Van Mons is still considered to be the most productive pear grower in Belgium. Thousands of seedlings emerged from his sowing attempts, with which he continued to work in several generations and from which he selected, propagated and spread numerous varieties based on their fruit and growth characteristics. He mainly worked with pears, but also grew some apple and stone fruit varieties. Van Mons was known for giving large quantities of seeds, young seedlings and vines to pomological colleagues, on the one hand to disseminate cultivars that he found to be particularly worthy of reproduction, and on the other to encourage other colleagues for the idea of ​​improving the fruit varieties through sowing and To inspire selection. Some of the trees that emerged from the propagation material were then viewed as the new owners' cultivars, named by them by variety names and described pomologically, although they actually go back to van Mons. Since van Mons maintained close contacts with pomologists, especially abroad, with whom he exchanged Reiser of his breeds, his breeds gained international distribution, in Germany primarily through Oberdieck and Diel , with whom van Mons was in lively professional exchange.

Many of the fruits cultivated by van Mons are still common today.

Apples

Baumann's Renette

• Baumann's Renette , around 1800
• August van Mons (van Mons dedicated this apple to his son Urbain Henri Auguste, who died young)

Pears

Double Philipps Pear

• Anjou (Nec-Plus Meuris, Winter-Meuris), around 1820
• Baroness von Mello (Philippe Goes), 1840
• Double Philipps Pear (Beurré de Mérode), around 1800
• Clement van Mons
• Du-Mortier's Butter Pear, around 1818
• Esperine, around 1826
• Hofratsbirne (Conseiller de la cour), 1840
• Leon Leclerc de Laval, 1816
• New Poiteau, 1827
• Princess Marianne , around 1800
• Susanne
• Theodor van Mons, named after van Mons' second youngest son Théodore-François Antoine Joseph

Publications

- in the field of chemistry, pharmacy and medicine

• Essai sur la principe de la Chimie antiphlogiste ; 1785
• Principes d'électricité, en confirmation de la théorie électrique de Franklin; Addresses in one letter, à Brugnatelli. Emmanuel Flon, Bruxelles 1793
• Philosophy chimique ou Vérités fondamentales de la chimie moderne, disposées dans un nouvel ordre; par AF Fourcroy. Nouvelle édition, augmentée de notes et d'axiomes tirés des dernières découvertes. Emmanuel Flon, Bruxelles 1794
• Pharmacopée manual Richard Caille, Ravier 1800
• New practical medicine book for doctors, surgeons and pharmacists: increased with many notes and additions. Translated from the French by Johann Bartholomäus Trommsdorff, Hennings, Erfurt 1801
• Théorie de la combustion. Bruxelles 1802
• Sur les trois nouveaux corps chimiques, les métallofluores, l'iodine et l'huile détonnante de Dulong. Bruxelles 1809
• Dissertation on l'origine et sur la distribution uniforme de la chaleur animale. Journal de Physique, de Chimie et d'Histoire Naturelle, LXVIII 1809, pp. 121-131.
• Lettre à Bucholz sur la formation des métaux en général, et en particulier de ceux de Davy, ou Essai sur une réforme générale de la théorie chimique ; 1811
• Principles of electricity theory to confirm Franklin's theory ; Marburg, warrior, 1812
• Principes élémentaires de chimie philosophique, avec des applications générales de la doctrine des proportions déterminées ; 1818
• Annales générales des sciences Physiques with Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent and Pierre Auguste Joseph Drapiez (1778–1856), 8 volumes; Brussels, Weissenbruch, 1818–1821
• Mémoire sur la réduction des alcalis en métal ; 1826
• Mémoire sur quelques ereurs concernant la nature du chlore et sur plusieurs nouvelles propriétés de l'acide muriatique ; 1826
• Quelques particularités concernant les brouillards de différente nature ; 1827
• Sur une particularité dans la manière dont se font les combinaisons par le pyrophore ; 1838
• Efficacité des métaux compactes et polis dans la construction des pyrophores ; 1838

- in the field of horticulture, pomology and fruit tree growing

• Catalog descriptif abrégé, contenant une partie des arbres fruitiers qui, depuis 1798, jusqu 'en 1823, ont formé la collection de JB Van Mons , 1823
• Observations made in the tree nursery de la Fidélité in Brussels, along with descriptions of various new varieties of apples and pears that were grown there. In: New General Garden Magazine, 1st year, Verlag des Großherzoglichen Sächsischen private Landes-Industrie-Comptoir, Weimar 1825, p. 39ff
• About the grafting, eyeballing and pulling of garden roses in Flanders. In: Volume 3 of the Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London in Gill's technical repository . April 1827, p. 196
• Arbres fruitiers: leur culture en Belgique et leur propagation par la graine: ou, Pomonomie Belge, expérimentale et raisonnée . Volume 1, L. Dusart et H. Vandenbro, Louvain 1835
• Arbres fruitiers: leur culture en Belqique et leur propagation par la graine: ou, Pomonomie Belge, expérimentale et raisonnée . Volume 2, L. Dusart et H. Vandenbro, Louvain 1836

See also

• List of pomologists

Web links

Wikisource: Jean-Baptiste Van Mons  - Sources and full texts

• Biography at DBNL (Dutch)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Genealogical data on Jean-Baptiste Ferdinand Antoine Joseph van Mons on Geneanet ; Retrieved May 20, 2014
2. ↑ F. Jahn: No. 124. Theodor van Mons. In: F. Jahn, E. Lucas, JGC Oberdieck: Illustrirtes Handbuch der Obstkunde. Second volume: pears. Verlag von Ebner and Seubert, Stuttgart 1860, p. 271
3. ↑ K. Koch: Van Mons and his theory. In: GCJ Oberdieck, E. Lucas: Illustrated monthly books for fruit and viticulture - Organ of the German Pomologists Association, Eugen Ulmer, Ravensburg 1872, p. 135
4. ^ JB van Mons: Essai sur la principe de la Chimie antiphlogiste
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Jean-Baptiste Van Mons (1765–1842). In: Nature. 150, 1942, pp. 286-286, doi : 10.1038 / 150286c0 .
6. ^ List of former members since 1666: Letter V. Académie des sciences, accessed on March 10, 2020 (French). 
7. ↑ K. Koch: Van Mons and his theory. In: GCJ Oberdieck, E. Lucas: Illustrated monthly books for fruit and viticulture - organ of the German Pomologists Association, Eugen Ulmer, Ravensburg 1872, p. 97
8. ↑ JB van Mons: Observations made in the tree nursery de la Fidélité in Brussels, along with descriptions of various new varieties of apples and pears that were grown there. New General Garden Magazine, 1st year, Verlag des Großherzoglichen Sächsischen private Landes-Industrie-Comptoirs, Weimar 1825, p. 39ff
9. ↑ K. Koch: Van Mons and his theory. In: GCJ Oberdieck, E. Lucas: Illustrated monthly books for fruit and viticulture - Organ of the German Pomologists Association, Eugen Ulmer, Ravensburg 1872, p. 134
10. ↑ Catalog descriptif abrégé, contenant une partie des arbres fruitiers qui, depuis 1798, jusqu 'en 1823, ont formé la collection de JB Van Mons, 1823
11. ↑ K. Koch: Van Mons and his theory. In: GCJ Oberdieck, E. Lucas: Illustrated monthly books for fruit and viticulture - Organ of the German Pomologists Association, Eugen Ulmer, Ravensburg 1872, p. 136
12. ↑ W. Schuricht: Van Mons (1765-1842) - the most successful Belgian pear grower. In: Pomologen-Verein eV annual booklet 2008, p. 62
13. ↑ K. Koch: Van Mons and his theory. In: GCJ Oberdieck, E. Lucas: Illustrated monthly books for fruit and viticulture - Organ of the German Pomologist Association, Eugen Ulmer, Ravensburg 1872, p. 98
14. ↑ K. Koch: Van Mons and his theory. In: GCJ Oberdieck, E. Lucas: Illustrated monthly books for fruit and viticulture - organ of the German Pomologists Association, Eugen Ulmer, Ravensburg 1872, p. 97
15. ↑ JGC Oberdieck: No. 498. Auguste van Mons. In: E. Lucas, JGC Oberdieck: Illustrirtes Handbuch der Obstkunde. Fourth volume: apples. Published by Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart 1875, p. 475
16. ↑ F. Jahn: No. 124. Theodor van Mons. In: F. Jahn, E. Lucas, JGC Oberdieck: Illustrirtes Handbuch der Obstkunde. Second volume: pears. Verlag von Ebner and Seubert, Stuttgart 1860, p. 271