Invention Timeline – Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, Swiss Botanist; Developed the Doctrine of Metamorphosis in “Vegetable Organography” (1827)
b. February 4, 1778 and d. September 9, 1841
Swiss botanist. In his “Elementary Theory of Botany” (1813) he developed a new classification of plants according to the natural system. He developed the doctrine of metamorphosis in his “Vegetable Organography” (1827). He occupied the highest rank among the botanists of the nineteenth century, and was a friend of Cuvier, Humboldt and Lamarck.
See him from nature rising slow to art!
To copy instinct there was reason’s part:
Thus then to man the voice of nature spake-
Go, from the creatures thy instruction take;
Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield;
Learn from the beasts the physics of the field;
Thy arts of building from the bee receive;
Learn of the mole to plow, the worm to weave:
Learn of the little Nautilus to sail,
Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale.
—Essay on Man: Pope
Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the
splendor of meaning that plays over the visible
world knew that a tree had another use than for
apples, and corn another than for meal, and the
ball of the earth than for tillage and roads; that
these things bore a second and finer harvest to the
mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying
in all their natural history a certain mute
commentary on human life.
—Representative Men: Emerson
