page_title: Venance Payot
section_title: Naturalist
hierarchical_section_title: Venance Payot / Naturalist
context_page_description: Venance Payot was a naturalist, glaciologist, alpine mountain-guide, scholar, author, and two-time mayor of Chamonix, France. He published a wide range of early scientific literature relating to the mountains of the Mont Blanc massif and undertook some of the earliest continued measurements of the movement of glaciers within that mountain range. He has been posthumously credited in mountaineering literature with being the youngest person to have climbed Mont Blanc, and would have been sixteen years old at the time; other sources have challenged this.
context_section_description: He was an avid collector of minerals, rocks and plants, and came to be a respected and renowned naturalist. Some of the carefully labelled specimens he amassed are now in Château d'Annecy and in the Chamonix Alpine Museum. He also built up a considerable collection of books on the natural sciences and later donated some 385 items to Annecy Library, along with a 2,000 franc sum to maintain and expand it.
  He was a member of the Association Florimontane d'Annecy, founded in 1607, and contributed articles to that association's journal of research in the Savoy region. Payot made many botanical studies of the mountains of the Mont Blanc massif, publishing numerous academic books or pamphlets on the subject, including vascular plants, ferns, bryophytes, and herpetology.
caption: View of the "Garden" on the glacier du Talefre, Mont Blanc, whose plants were studied by Payot.[10]
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