Marie Hypolite Irénée Thériot (21 December 1859 – 25 March 1947), credited as Irénée Thériot was a French bryologist and school teacher. He was orphaned as a child, trained as a teacher and became head of a school in

Le Havre Le Havre is a major port city in the Seine-Maritime department in the Normandy (administrative region), Normandy region of northern France. It is situated on the right bank of the estuary of the Seine, river Seine on the English Channel, Channe ...

from 1888 until 1920. He married but his wife (died 1938) and son (died 1917, aged 30) pre-deceased him. He was a member of the Société Botanique de France. He was particularly interested in mosses, which he studied in his spare time. He described over 1000 new species and genera. These came from many parts of the world, obtained by exchanging specimens with others. He continued to study mosses and liverworts, including using a microscope, into his early 80s. Thériot edited the

exsiccata Exsiccata (Latin, ''gen.'' -ae, ''plur.'' -ae) is a work with "published, uniform, numbered set of preserved specimens distributed with printed labels". Typically, exsiccatae are numbered collections of dried herbarium Biological specimen, spe ...

''Musci et Hepaticae Novae-Caledoniae exsiccati''. Thériot's personal herbarium collection is currently housed at the

Muséum national d'histoire naturelle The French National Museum of Natural History ( ; abbr. MNHN) is the national natural history museum of France and a of higher education part of Sorbonne University. The main museum, with four galleries, is located in Paris, France, within the Ja ...

. Jules Cardot named the genus '' Theriotia'' in honor of Thériot.

Publications

He was the author or co-author of scientific publications and books about the floras of North America, Tunisia, China and New Caledonia. They include: * The mosses of Alaska by J. Cardot and I. Thériot about collections made during the Jules Cardot and Harriman expedition to Alaska in 1899. Published as a book in 1904 (probably), from an initial publication in the Proceedings of the Washington Academy of Sciences in 1902 (volume 4, pages 293–372).

References

20th-century French botanists French schoolteachers 1859 births 1947 deaths French bryologists Scientists from Le Havre {{France-botanist-stub