Joseph Pitton de Tournefort

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Joseph Pitton de Tournefort.

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (born June 5, 1656 in Aix-en-Provence , † December 28, 1708 in Paris ) was a French botanist and explorer . Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Tourn. "

Live and act

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort was born on June 5, 1656 in Aix-en-Provence and baptized on June 13, 1656 in the Saint-Sauveur Cathedral of Aix-en-Provence . He came from a family of the lower French nobility who owned a small estate in Aix . His parents were Pierre Pitton Écuyer Seigneur de Tournefort and Aimare de Fagoue. He had two sisters, Anne (* 1654) and Magdeleine (* 1659).

Tourneforts Reisen
Title page of Institutiones Rei Herbariae (1700)
The description of the genus Opuntia was supplemented by this panel by Claude Aubriet .

Tournefort received his first training at the Jesuit College in Aix. According to his father's wishes, he was to be trained as a clergyman, but showed little interest in the study of classical languages ​​and theology. He secretly studied the philosophy of René Descartes and became enthusiastic about botany at an early age . When his father died in 1677, Tournefort was able to devote himself entirely to botany. He went on an excursion into the mountains of Dauphiné and Savoy , during which he collected a variety of plants that formed the basis for his herbarium . In 1679 he went to Montpellier for almost two years , where he attended anatomical and medical courses, but also the botanical lectures of Pierre Magnol . He then went on another excursion to the Pyrenees in Catalonia , where no botanist had collected plants since Charles de l'Écluse . At the end of 1681 he returned to Aix to organize and classify the plants he had collected.

Tournefort, whose reputation as a botanist had spread in France, was invited to Paris by Guy-Crescent Fagon in 1683 and succeeded Fagons at the chair of botany at the Jardin du Roi . Despite his teaching duties, he continued his extensive travel activities. In Spain he botanized in Andalusia and then in Portugal . Shortly afterwards he visited England and the Netherlands , where Paul Hermann tried to win him over to the University of Leiden . On November 21, 1691 he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences .

In 1694 his main work, Éléments de botanique, ou methode pour connoître les plantes , appeared, which he dedicated to King Louis XIV . The better known and revised Latin translation of the three volumes appeared six years later under the title Institutiones Rei Herbariae . The first volume describes around 7000 plant species. The other two volumes contain 451 plates by Claude Aubriet , on which the details of the flower and fruit structure of a specimen typical of the species are shown. Similar to August Quirinus Rivinus , Tournefort used the flower as the basis for a subdivision of the plants, which in his case comprised 22 classes. His main focus was not on the symmetry and the numerical proportions of the flower structure, but on the adhesions of the flowers. The current generic term for plants has its origins in this work by Tournefort, as it describes all genera with a brief diagnosis . He also included mushrooms in his diagnostic system . The genera Fungus , Fungoides , Boletus , Lycoperdon , Coralloides , Tubera and Agaricus described by him are the first genera of fungi in the modern sense. In the lichen Tournefort recognized an independent systematic group. Until the publication of Carl von Linnés Species Plantarum , this Tournefort work, which was questioned by John Ray , was groundbreaking for the botanical systematics.

It was not until 1696 that Tournefort received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in Paris. In 1698 he published a directory of the plants growing in the vicinity of Paris, which he dedicated to Fagon.

At the suggestion of Louis Phélypeaux (1643–1727), at the end of 1699, King Louis XIV commissioned him to explore the Levant . On March 9, 1700, he set off for Marseille with the German doctor Andreas von Gundelsheimer and the draftsman Claude Aubriet , where they embarked on April 23, 1700 and arrived on May 3 in the port city of Chania on the Greek island of Crete . In Crete they visited the cities of Candia and Retimo as well as the labyrinth at Gortyn . The group explored numerous islands in the Aegean Sea and eventually came to Constantinople . Accompanied by the retinue of the Pasha of Erzurum, they continued their journey along the southern coast of the Black Sea via the coastal cities of Sinop and Trabzon to Colchis . They arrived in Erzurum on June 15th . From there Tournefort went on several excursions to the Armenian mountains. A caravan took us to Tbilisi and finally to Yerevan , from where Tournefort climbed Mount Ararat to the snow line in August . He later compared the altitude levels of the Ararat with the Armenian, Mediterranean, French, Scandinavian and Arctic flora . On September 12, 1701, the return journey began, which took the tour company by land via Tokat , Angora , Bursa to Ephesus and Smyrna . On April 13th, a 40-day voyage with the Golden Sun began from Smyrna , which first brought them to Livorno , before they reached Marseille again on June 3, 1702 on board a felucca .

From the two-year trip, Tournefort brought 1356 different plant species with him, belonging to 673 genera and which he described in 1703 in an addition to Institutiones Rei Herbariae , the Corollarium . His written description of the trip, Relation d'un Voyage du Levant , was not published until after his death.

In 1706 Tournefort became a professor of medicine at the Collège Royal in Paris. In 1708 he was seriously injured by a passing car on Rue Lacépède in front of the Jardin du Roi . He died a month later at the age of 53 as a result of this injury.

Taxonomic honor

Charles Plumier named the genus Pittonia in his honor . Carl von Linné later rejected this name and named the genus Tournefortia . It belongs to the Boraginaceae family of plants . Also the plant genera Pittoniotis Griseb. and Tournefortiopsis Rusby from the family of the redness plants (Rubiaceae) are named after him.

Fonts

Books

Journal articles (selection)

  • Description d'un mushroom extraordinaire . In: Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences . 1692, pp. 101-103; on-line
  • Reflexions Physiques sur la production du Champignon dont il a été parlé dans les Mémoires du mois dernier . In: Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences . 1692, pp. 119-126; on-line
  • Conjectures sur les usages des Vaisseaux dans certaines Planetes . In: Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences . 1692, pp. 191-197; on-line
  • Observations Physiques touchant les muscles de certaines Plantes . In: Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences . 1692, pp. 406-415; on-line

proof

literature

  • Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle : Eloge de Tournefort . In: Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences . Paris 1708, pp. 145–177 ( PDF )
  • James Augustus St. John: The Lives of Celebrated Travelers . J. & J. Harper, 1835, Vol. 2, pp. 7-19.
  • Karl Mägdefrau : history of botany . Gustav Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart 1992, pp. 52-54, ISBN 3-437-20489-0 .
  • Kurt Sprengel : History of botany: revised in two parts . FA Brockhaus, 1818, part 2, pp. 53–59

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In memoriam: Les Membres de l'Académie des sciences depuis sa création  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 74 kB)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.academie-sciences.fr  
  2. ^ Charles Plumier: Nova Plantarum Americanarum Genera . Leiden 1703, p. 5.
  3. ^ Carl von Linné: Critica Botanica . Leiden 1737, p. 94.
  4. ↑ Carl von Linné: Genera Plantarum . Leiden 1742, p. 62.
  5. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names - Extended Edition. Part I and II. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin , Freie Universität Berlin , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-946292-26-5 doi: 10.3372 / epolist2018 .

Web links

Commons : Joseph Pitton de Tournefort  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French clergyman and botanist
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1656
PLACE OF BIRTH Aix-en-Provence
DATE OF DEATH December 28, 1708
Place of death Paris