JUSSIEU, Antoine de, doctor of physic, professor of botany in the Royal Garden at Paris, and a member of the Academie des Sciences, was born at Lyons in the year 1686, and educated at Montpellier, where he took his degree of doctor of physic, after which he became associated with the faculty of Paris. Although much occupied in the practice of medicine in the capital, he was ardently devoted to the study of botany, having, in the earlier part of his life, visited Spain and the southern provinces of France in search of plants. When stationary at Paris, he communicated various essays to the academy, which are printed in its Mémoires. These are chiefly botanical, illustrating the characters or the qualities of various exotics, at that period not well known; but he has given several papers also, on extraneous fossils, and a few other subjects of natural history. He furnished the two Appendices to Tournefort’s Institutiones Rei Herbaria, and edited the Icοnes of Barrelier. He also published an historical account of the magnificent collection of drawings of plants and animals, originally begun under the auspices of Gaston duke of Orleans, and continued down to the present times. When Linnaeus visited Paris in 1738, he, in a letter to Haller, mentioned the elder Jussieu, as “much engaged in medical practice, well versed in the knowledge of the species of plants, though too prone to multiply them, and strictly confined to the ideas and principles of Tournefort.” In one important point, however, which could hardly escape Linnaeus, and ought not to be forgotten, he emancipated himself from the errors of his master, for he perfectly understood, and fully admitted, the doctrine of the sexes of plants. A letter of his, completely explaining this phenomenon on the most correct principles, is given by Bradley, in his Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature (p. 25-32). He died of an apoplectic fit, at Paris, on the 22d of April 1758, aged seventy-two.

Jussieu, Bernard de, younger brother of the preceding» and, like him, a physician, and a member of the Academic des Sciences, was still more devoted to the philosophical as well as practical study of botany, and ranks amongst the greatest names in that science, as having first attempted to form a system according to the natural affinities of plants. He was born at Lyons in 1699, and appears to have accompanied or followed his brother to Paris, where he occupied, under him, the place of botanical demonstrator in the Jardin du Roi, and at length succeeded him as professor of botany. If his communications to the academy were less numerous than those of his brother, they were of a rather superior character. In one of them, published in the Mémoires of that body for 1742, he enters on the subject, then scarcely touched by any person, of the animal nature of certain marine productions, previously taken for plants; and we perceive, in his inquiries, dawnings of that meridian light which our countryman Ellis afterwards threw on these curious tribes. On other occasions he explained the flowers of the Litto- rella, and, with much acuteness, the more obscure fructification of the Pilularia. He wrote, in conjunction with the learned Comte de Caylus, on the Papyrus; and he gave an improved edition of Tournefort’s History of the Plants about Paris, in 1725.

Linnaeus became personally acquainted with this ingenious man at Paris in 1738, and maintained, for some years, an intimate correspondence with him. They could not be long in each other’s company without discussing the natural affinities of plants; a study which seems to have been much advanced, if not first excited, in the mind of Linnaeus, by his correspondence with Haller. Bernard de Jussieu had probably about the same time been led to consider it by his own contemplations; for the system of Tournefort, in which he was educated, is too artificial in principle to have given him any such ideas. In its execution, indeed, that great author is led, by his own good sense, into some natural and philosophical views, even in spite of his system; and these may possibly have caught the attention of Jussieu. However this may be, mutual satisfaction and instruction could not but flow from the intercourse of Bernard de Jussieu and Linnaeus. They traced out together the characters and the limits of various natural assemblages or orders. Every day produced, and every letter communicated, some new discovery. But as the multifarious hordes of the north appear originally to have used one common tongue, which, after they were dispersed, divided, and cultivated, when it came to be written, assumed the form of various distinct languages; so these two botanical philosophers, when their more intimate intercourse had ceased, pursued different paths, and went far towards different conclusions. Linnaeus, after throwing the whole vegetable creation, more or less completely, into natural groups, became more and more persuaded that it was not only impracticable to connect them by one synoptic clue or system, but that not one of his assemblages or orders was capable of precise and unexceptionable definition. On the other hand, Bernard de Jussieu, to the last, aimed at a general scheme of classification, though he accomplished little more than throwing his several orders into larger assemblages, and disposing the whole, as indeed Linnaeus himself has done, in one series, according to their relationship to each other. The French botanist is recorded to have spoken with great diffidence of his own performance, and he has written nothing of a general classification. But be often gave hints, in lectures or conversation, by which others perhaps profited. This appears from the preface to the Genera Plantarum of his distinguished nephew, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, botanical professor at Paris, who, following up the ideas of his uncle, and sacrificing something to technical convenience, at the expense of nature, contrived to exhibit a tolerably natural system, founded on methodical principles.

It would be to little purpose to discuss, at the present day, the claims of Linnaeus or of Bernard de Jussieu to originality in the study of natural orders. Professor de Candolle has justly asserted, that they had the samc object in view, and adopted, in the main, the same principles. Bernard de Jussieu having, in a letter dated the 15th of February 1742, congratulated Linnaeus on his appointment to the botanical chair at Upsal, says, “Eloroe devotus omnino poteris viam quam monstrasti facilem amplius aperire, naturalem que methodum tandem perficere, quam desiderant et expectant boternophyli omnes.” In a subsequent letter of the 7th May, 1746, he also tells his Swedish friend, “Scio quantum emolumentum receperint qui secundum tua principia student; mcmet experientia docuit J This is enough to settle the question, though great allowance is perhaps due to the modesty of Jussieu, who was less disposed to honour himself than his friend.
[7:12:654]

His biographer, the celebrated Marquis de Condorcet, records his singularly amiable and unaffected manners. These, during his occupation of arranging, according to natural classes, the garden of Trianon, attracted the notice and esteem of his sovereign, Louis XV. to whom any unsophisticated character or object could not but form an agreeable relaxation from the routine of a court. Jussieu obtained plants and seeds to be sent to his friend in the king’s name. He pursued his innocent and useful studies till his death, which happened in 1777, in his seventy-ninth year.

A compendious view of his nephew’s system, and a comparison of their natural orders with ’ those . of Lin-naens, may be seen under the article Botany.