Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656 - 1708)
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Biography
Sources
Selected publications
Biography
studies at Montpellier
1683 appointed substitute lecturer at the Jardin du Roi
1708 killed in a traffic accident
Tournefort was a collector who became a botanist. By the time he came to Paris, he was already well-known to the botanists there through correspondence, although he had published nothing. Of course, he eventually made up for that.
Tournefort "was the one who first gave the genus a clear-cut status in a scheme of classification." Isley His genera were concise, well-defined, and useful enough to popularize them (and the concept of them) among biologists in general. Most of them were taken over by Linnaeus sixty years later.
But he is mostly included here because
"He recognized lichens as a special group.... [and] his descriptive and interpretative work on fungi was not only a beacon ahead for mycologists to come but also included methods for mushroom culture." Isley
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Sources
Duane Isley (1994) One Hundred and One Botanists
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Selected Publications
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1689) Schola Botanica (School of Botany)a write-up of lecture notes by one of his students
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1694) Éléments de botanique, ou methode pour connoître les plantes (Elements of botany, or method to know the plants)His major work, covering about 7000 species.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1700) Institutiones rei herbariae, editio altera (The characters of the things in a herbarium)The latin translation of his Éléments de botanique, and the version in which this work is usually known (in spite of its strange title...).
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717) Relation d'un voyage du Levant (Story of a voyage to the Levant)Posthumous publication of some of his correspondence
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