Edme-Louis Daubenton (12 August 1730 – 12 December 1785) was a French
naturalist.
Daubenton was the cousin of another French naturalist,
Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton
Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton (29 May 1716 – 1 January 1800) was a French naturalist and contributor to the ''Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers''.
Biography
Daubenton was born at Montbard, Côte-d' ...
.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon engaged Edme-Louis Daubenton to supervise the coloured illustrations for the monumental ''
Histoire Naturelle
The ''Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi'' (; en, Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the King's Cabinet, italic=yes) is an encyclopaedic collection of 36 large (qu ...
'' (1749–89). The ''Planches enluminée'' started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 plates, all engraved by
François-Nicolas Martinet François-Nicolas Martinet (1731 - 1800) was a French engineer, engraver and naturalist.
Martinet engraved the plates for numerous works on natural history, especially ornithology. Notable in particular are those for ''l'Ornithologia, sive Synop ...
(1731–1800), and all painted by hand. The
Paris
Paris () is the capital and 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), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
ian publisher
Panckoucke
The Panckoucke family was a French family engaged in publishing and printing.
* Amélie Panckoucke (1750-1830), writer and salonnière, sister of Charles-Joseph ;
* André Joseph Panckoucke (1703-1753), founder of the Panckoucke bookstore in Li ...
published a version without text between 1765 and 1783. More than 80 artists took part in the realization of the original paintings. 973 plates relate to
bird
Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweigh ...
s; others illustrate especially
butterflies
Butterflies are insects in the macrolepidopteran clade Rhopalocera from the Order (biology), order Lepidoptera, which also includes moths. Adult butterflies have large, often brightly coloured wings, and conspicuous, fluttering flight. The ...
but also other
insect
Insects (from Latin ') are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body ( head, thorax and abdomen), three pairs ...
s,
coral
Corals are marine invertebrates within the class Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They typically form compact colonies of many identical individual polyps. Coral species include the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and sec ...
s, etc. The illustrations were not very successful, but they allow a rather good determination of the species illustrated, some of them now extinct. As Buffon did not follow the system of
biological nomenclature
Nomenclature codes or codes of nomenclature are the various rulebooks that govern biological taxonomic nomenclature, each in their own broad field of organisms. To an end-user who only deals with names of species, with some awareness that species ...
developed by
Carl von Linné
Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the ...
in 1783,
Pieter Boddaert
Pieter Boddaert (1730 – 6 May 1795) was a Dutch physician and natural history, naturalist.
Early life, family and education
Boddaert was the son of a Middelburg jurist and poet by the same name (1694–1760). The younger Pieter obtained his M.D ...
(1730–1796) published a table of the correspondence of the names used with their Linnean
binomial names
In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called nomenclature ("two-name naming system") or binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, bot ...
.
Edme-Louis Daubenton's tombstone is in the church of Saint-Pierre in
Avon, Seine-et-Marne
Avon () is a commune in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France.
Geography
Avon and Fontainebleau, together with three other smaller communes, form an urban area of 36,713 inhabitants. The two towns shar ...
.
Publications
*
References
*Benezit, E. (1999) ''Dictionnaire Critique et Documentaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs de Tous les Temps et de Tous les Pays''. Nouvelle Edition. Paris: Gründ,.
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dabenton, Edme-Louis
French naturalists
French ornithologists
French entomologists
People from Montbard
1730 births
1785 deaths