Michel Adanson

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Adanson, Michel

 

Born Apr. 7, 1727; died Aug. 3, 1806. French botanist. Member of the French Academy of Sciences (1759).

Adanson was one of the founders of the natural system of plant classification, a variant of which he propounded in Families of Plants. In his search for the logical foundations of classification, he drew up 65 artificial systems, each one of which was based on a particular characteristic; comparing these systems, Adanson gauged the degree of proximity between related groups of plants, or taxons, thus becoming one of the pioneers in the application of mathematical methods to biology. Adanson believed in the possibility of transforming species. After 1772 he became infatuated with philosophy and with the Utopian idea of a single-handed compilation of a multivolume universal encyclopedia.

REFERENCE

Adanson. The Bicentennial of Michel Adanson’s “Families des plantes,” parts 1–2. Pittsburgh, 1963.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
Perez-Moreau & Crespo (1992), transfieren esta especie al genero Loasa Adanson basandose en la dehiscencia del fruto (capsula dehiscente por encima de la insercion de los lobulos calicinos hasta el apice), criterio compartido en el presente tratamiento, en contraposicion con Weigend (1997) y Ackermann & Weigend (2007) quienes no comparten esta idea.
Survey of pathologies in Crassostrea gasar (Adanson, 1757) oysters from cultured and wild populations in the Sao Francisco Estuary, Sergipe, northeast Brazil.
Marie-Therese Reboul's skillful rendering of natural phenomena, which so impressed Vien and the comte de Caylus, is easily observed in her illustrations for Adanson's Histoire naturelle du Senegal.
preponderance of typified family names starting with Michael Adanson
Restriction patterns were analyzed with the Taxotron package (Taxolab Software, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France) comprising the RestrictoScan, RestrictoTyper, Adanson, and Dendrograph programs.
Preliminary investigation into some factors affecting the settlement of the larvae of the mangrove oyster Crassostrea gasar (Adanson) in the Lagos lagoon.
Most centrally, he uses a passage from the botanist Adanson (of Baobab fame), a careful ethnographer, and perhaps the first to teach himself an African language, who in a moment of careless rapture described a village scene as 'a perfect image of pure nature [...] the whole revived in my mind the idea of our first parents, and I seemed to contemplate the world in its primitive state' (p.
Michel Adanson (1727-1806), Bernard de Jussieu (1699-1777), and Augustin Pyrame de Candolle (1778-1841, who introduced the idea of taxonomy) all produced "natural" classifications that grouped plants into families on the basis of more "natural" features, including their general anatomy and embryonic development.