Pierre Heude

Pierre Heude

Pierre Marie Heude (born June 25, 1836 in Fougères , Brittany , France , † January 3, 1902 in Xujiahui , Chinese Empire ) was a French missionary and naturalist who worked for a long time in China and East Asia. He was primarily a malacologist , but also worked with turtles and mammals.

Live and act

In 1856 Heude entered the Jesuit order . After studying philosophy and theology, he was ordained a priest in 1867 and then sent to China. Heude arrived in Shanghai on January 9, 1868 , where he began his research work throughout East Asia. Heude amassed most of his collection in the Yangtze River valley in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces , where the Jesuits had several missions. Further expeditions took him to Japan, the Philippines and Indochina.

Heude was stationed on a Catholic mission near Zi-ka-wei (now Xujiahui) about 8 km southwest of Shanghai, where he built a natural history museum next to the church, which later housed the largest natural history collection in China as the Heude museum. In 1873 and 1874 prominent naturalists such as Armand David and Robert Swinhoe visited the museum. At the beginning of the 20th century, Frank Wall studied the museum's snake collection. After 1933, Heude's museum collection became the property of Fudan University . Since the 1950s, a part has been in the Shanghai Natural History Museum and the main part in the Zoological Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Heude's main research focus was the mollusks, but he first described several species of mammals, including the tamarau , the genus of the red-cheeked squirrel , the Annamite pustular pig , the Visayas pustular pig , the calamian deer , the green-backed bat and the now extinct Annamite Java rhinoceros . In another work entitled Mémoire sur le Trionyx from 1880, he dealt with the turtle species Rafetus swinhoei and Pelodiscus sinensis .

Heude died on January 3rd, 1902 after a long and serious illness that he contracted between 1899 and 1900 during his last expedition to the Kingdom of Siam .

Fonts (selection)

• Conchyliologie fluviatile de la province de Nanking et de la Chine centrale . Paris. 10 volumes. ( Digitized version ) ( Further digitized version ), 1875–1885
• Notes on the Mollusques terrestres de la vallée du Fleuve Bleu ( digital copy ). Mémoires concernant l'histoire naturelle de lempire chinois par des pères de la Compagnie de Jésus , Mision Catholique, Chang-Hai, 1882–1890
  • 2 : 1-88, plates 12-21, 1882
  • 3 : 89-132, plates 22-32, 1885
  • 4 : 125 [sic] -188, plates 33-43, 1890

literature

• Kraig Adler (Ed.): Contributions to the History of Herpetology , Volume 3, Contributions to Herpetology Volume 29, Society for the study of amphibians and reptiles, 2012. ISBN 978-0-916984-82-3 . P. 151

Web links

Commons : Pierre Heude  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Rompel, Josef. " Pierre Heude. " The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 7. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910, accessed July 9, 2015
• Un savant fougerais (French)