François Augustin Marie Augier de Favas (15 December 1758 – 29 January 1825), also known as Augustin Augier, was a French schoolteacher, a

Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

priest, and a botanist.

Life and career

Augustin Augier was born on 15 December 1758 in Saint-Tropez,

Var Var or VAR may refer to: Places * Var (department), a department of France * Var (river), France * Vār, Iran, village in West Azerbaijan Province, Iran * Var, Iran (disambiguation), other places in Iran * Vár, a village in Obreja commune, Ca ...

. A member of the French Oratorian order, he was trained in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

and

ordained Ordination is the process by which individuals are consecrated, that is, set apart and elevated from the laity class to the clergy, who are thus then authorized (usually by the denominational hierarchy composed of other clergy) to perform ...

a priest on 22 May 1789, on the eve of the

Revolution In political science, a revolution (Latin: ''revolutio'', "a turn around") is a fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organization which occurs when the population revolts against the government, typically due ...

. For the first part of his career, Augier taught at various Oratorian institutions in France, including at the renown Collège de Tournon, in the

Rhône The Rhône ( , ; wae, Rotten ; frp, Rôno ; oc, Ròse ) is a major river in France and Switzerland, rising in the Alps and flowing west and south through Lake Geneva and southeastern France before discharging into the Mediterranean Sea. At Ar ...

valley. For the latter part, he set up and ran his own boarding schools in

Saint-Donat-sur-l'Herbasse Saint-Donat-sur-l'Herbasse (; Vivaro-Alpine: ''Sant Donat'') is a commune in the Drôme department in southeastern France. The writer and literary prizes winner Isabelle Hausser was born in Saint-Donat. Population Twin towns — sister cities ...

and Peyrins. On the side of his day-time work as a teacher, Augier was also an author. His most famous publication is undoubtedly the ''Essai d'une nouvelle classification des végétaux'', published in Lyons in 1801. Dedicated to botanical taxonomy, the study includes a systematic diagram known as the "Arbre botanique" ("Botanical Tree"); it is generally cited in the literature as the earliest known family tree diagram of natural order, or even as the first

evolutionary tree A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological spec ...

. Although Augier's tree diagram has been known to the scholarly community since 1983, his identity was only revealed in 2017. Augier died in the village of Peyrins,

Drôme Drôme (; Occitan: ''Droma''; Arpitan: ''Drôma'') is the southernmost department in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of Southeastern France. Named after the river Drôme, it had a population of 516,762 as of 2019.

, on 29 January 1825.

Publications

* ''Essai d'une nouvelle classification des végétaux''. Lyon, Bruyset, 1801 * ''Mémoire sur l'instruction publique, principalement sur l'enseignement de la langue latine''. Valence, 1812.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Augier, Augustin 1758 births 1825 deaths People from Saint-Tropez Oratorians 19th-century French botanists 18th-century French Roman Catholic priests 18th-century French botanists