Count Alexandre Henri Gabriel de Cassini (9 May 1781 – 23 April 1832) was a French
botanist and
naturalist, who specialised in the sunflower family (
Asteraceae
The family Asteraceae, alternatively Compositae, consists of over 32,000 known species of flowering plants in over 1,900 genera within the order Asterales. Commonly referred to as the aster, daisy, composite, or sunflower family, Compositae w ...
) (then known as family Compositae).
He was the youngest of five children of
Jacques Dominique, Comte de Cassini, famous for completing the
map of France, who had succeeded his father as the director of the
Paris Observatory. He was also the great-great-grandson of famous Italian-French
astronomer
An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses their studies on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. They observe astronomical objects such as stars, planets, moons, comets and galaxies – in either ...
,
Giovanni Domenico Cassini
Giovanni Domenico Cassini, also known as Jean-Dominique Cassini (8 June 1625 – 14 September 1712) was an Italian (naturalised French) mathematician, astronomer and engineer. Cassini was born in Perinaldo, near Imperia, at that time in the ...
, discoverer of
Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but slightly less than one-thousandth t ...
's
Great Red Spot and the
Cassini division in
Saturn's rings.
The genus ''
Cassinia'' was named in his honour by the botanist
Robert Brown.
He named many
flowering plant
Flowering plants are plants that bear flowers and fruits, and form the clade Angiospermae (), commonly called angiosperms. The term "angiosperm" is derived from the Greek words ('container, vessel') and ('seed'), and refers to those plants th ...
s and new genera in the sunflower family (Asteraceae), many of them from North America. He published 65 papers and 11 reviews in the ''
ouveauBulletin des Sciences'' of the
Société Philomatique de Paris between 1812 and 1821. In 1825, Cassini placed the North American taxa of ''
Prenanthes'' (family Asteraceae, tribe Lactuceae) in a new genus ''
Nabalus''. In 1828 he named ''Dugaldia hoopesii'' for the Scottish naturalist Dugald Stewart (1753–1828).
See also
*
:Taxa named by Henri Cassini
References
*
* King, Robert M., Paul C. Janaske, & David B. Lellinger (compilers). 1995. Cassini on Compositae II. ''Monographs in Systematic Botany from the Missouri Botanical Garden'' 54:
xii, 1-190.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cassini, Alexandre de
1781 births
1832 deaths
19th-century French botanists
French people of Italian descent
Members of the French Academy of Sciences