Career in Botany
In 1796, Candolle moved to Paris after receiving an invitation from French geologist Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu. His botanical career began with the help of René Louiche Desfontaines, who recommended Candolle for work in the herbarium of Charles Louis L'Héritier de Brutelle during the summer of 1798. The position elevated Candolle's reputation and also led to valuable instruction from Desfontaines himself. Candolle established his first genus, Senebiera, in 1799.
Candolle's first productions, Plantarum historia succulentarum (4 vols., 1799) and Astragalogia (1802), brought him to the notice of Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Candolle, with Cuvier's approval, acted as deputy at the Collège de France in 1802. Lamarck entrusted him with the publication of the third edition of the Flore française (1803–1815). In the introduction to this work, Principes élémentaires de botanique, Candolle proposed a natural method of plant classification as opposed to the artificial Linnaean method. The premise of Candolle's method is that taxa do not fall along a linear scale; they are discrete, not continuous.
In 1804, Candolle published his Essai sur les propriétés médicales des plantes and was granted a doctor of medicine degree by the medical faculty of Paris. Two years later, he published Synopsis plantarum in flora Gallica descriptarum. Candolle then spent the next six summers making a botanical and agricultural survey of France at the request of the French government, which was published in 1813. In 1807 he was appointed professor of botany in the medical faculty of the University of Montpellier, where he would later become the first chair of botany in 1810. While in Montpellier, Candolle published his Théorie élémentaire de la botanique (Elementary Theory of Botany, 1813), which introduced a new classification system and the word taxonomy. Candolle moved back to Geneva in 1816 and in the following year was invited by the government of the Canton of Geneva to fill the newly created chair of natural history.
Candolle spent the rest of his life in an attempt to elaborate and complete his natural system of botanical classification. Candolle published initial work in his Regni vegetabillis systema naturale, but after two volumes he realized he could not complete the project on such a large scale. Consequently, he began his less extensive Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis in 1824. However, he was only able to finish only seven volumes, or two-thirds of the whole. Even so, he was able to characterize over one hundred families of plants, helping to lay the empirical basis of general botany. Although Candolle's main focus was botany, throughout his career he also dabbled in fields related to botany, such as phytogeography, agronomy, paleontology, medical botany, and economic botany.
Read more about this topic: Augustin Pyramus De Candolle
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