Life
Born in London, he studied natural history in Paris. From 1837 to 1841 he led a scientific expedition to Canada where he studied the fauna of the Canadian lakes and the political systems of Upper and Lower Canada (roughly corresponding to the modern provinces of Ontario and Quebec) and of the United States.
Castelnau, a French savant, was sent by Louis Philippe, in 1843, with two botanists and a taxidermist, he crossed South America from Rio de Janeiro to Lima, following the watershed between the Amazon and La Plata river systems, and thence to Pará. He was gone for five years.
He served as the French consul in Bahia in 1848; in Siam from 1848 until 1862, and in Melbourne, Australia from 1864 to 1877.
The genus Laportea of tropical stinging trees is named after him.
Read more about this topic: Francis De Laporte De Castelnau
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Not too many years ago, a child’s experience was limited by how far he or she could ride a bicycle or by the physical boundaries that parents set. Today ... the real boundaries of a child’s life are set more by the number of available cable channels and videotapes, by the simulated reality of videogames, by the number of megabytes of memory in the home computer. Now kids can go anywhere, as long as they stay inside the electronic bubble.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“To approach a city ... as if it were [an] ... architectural problem ... is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life.... The results ... are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)