14 Facts About Michel Adanson

Michel Adanson was an 18th-century French botanist and naturalist who traveled to Senegal to study flora and fauna.

Michel Adanson proposed a "natural system" of taxonomy distinct from the binomial system forwarded by Linnaeus.

Michel Adanson attended lectures at the Jardin du Roi and the College Royal in Paris from 1741 to 1746.

Michel Adanson remained there for five years, collecting and describing numerous animals and plants.

Michel Adanson collected specimens of every object of commerce, delineated maps of the country, made systematic meteorological and astronomical observations, and prepared grammars and dictionaries of the languages spoken on the banks of the Senegal.

Sales of the work were slow, and after the publisher's bankruptcy and the reimbursement to subscribers, Adanson estimated the cost of the book to him had been 5,000 livres, beginning the penury in which he lived the rest of his life.

Michel Adanson founded his classification of all organised beings on the consideration of each individual organ.

In 1774 Michel Adanson submitted to the consideration of the French Academy of Sciences an immense work, extending to all known beings and substances.

Michel Adanson obstinately rejected this advice; and the huge work, at which he continued to labour, was never published.

Michel Adanson was an early proponent of the inheritance of acquired characters and a limited view of evolution.

Michel Adanson not only described evolution in his "Familles de plantes", published in 1763 when Lamarck was a young man of twenty, but suggested that the changes in specific characteristics were produced through the inheritance of acquired characters.

Michel Adanson made a serious attempt to classify fungi based on their fruit body complexity.

Michel Adanson was the first botanist to classify lichens with fungi.

Michel Adanson had been elected a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1759, and he latterly subsisted on a small pension it had conferred on him.