Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708)

‘In [botany], it is absolutely necessary to combine into groups those plants which resemble one another, and to separate them from those which they do not resemble. This resemblance should be deduced solely from the closest sign of relationship, i.e., from the structure of one of the parts of the plant, and must pay no attention to more distant signs of relationship that can be found between certain plants, such as the possession of similar [medicinal] virtues, or the place in which they occur’

Quote from Tournefort’s Élémens de botanique (1694), in Sloan (1972, p.40).

Mavi Boncuk | 

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (5 June 1656 – 28 December 1708) was a French botanist, notable as the first to make a clear definition of the concept of genus for plants. 

Tournefort came from a family of minor nobility. His father, Pierre Pitton, seigneur of Tournefort, inherited the estate from his father who had gained it by marriage. Pierre Pitton was a lawyer with sufficient means to purchase the office of royal secretary, which conferred the rights of nobility. Tournefort's mother, Aimare de Fagoue, was the daughter of a royal counselor at the chancellery of Provence.

Although clearly affluent, the family was not wealthy.

He studied medicine at Montpellier, but was appointed professor of botany at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in 1683. 

Tournefort was then sent by Louis XIV on a journey through what was then called the Levant with a wide scope not just confined to plants or natural history; he was to bring back information on the peoples and cities (including city plans) and their trade, manufactures and religions. He left Paris in 1700 visiting first Crete, then Greece, the Cyclades islands, Constantinople, Turkey and Georgia, returning in 1702. He was accompanied by the German botanist Andreas Gundesheimer (1668-1715) and the artist Claude Aubriet (1651-1743)[1]. 

[Image Source Relation d'un voyage du Levant / Volume I.p.32 :] Grec. Turc. Candiotes Publisher : Aux dépens de la Compagnie (Amsterdam) 1718 3

Tournefort died in Paris in 1708 some months after a street accident eerily like the one suffered by Morison, but an account of the journey Relations d’un Voyage au Levant was published posthumously in 1717 and was rapidly translated into English and Dutch. Worth bought a 1718 Amsterdam edition of this work.

His description of this journey was published posthumously (Relation d'un voyage du Levant), he himself having been killed by a carriage in Paris [1]; the road on which he died now bears his name (Rue de Tournefort in the 5ème arrondissement). 

 [1] Aubriet was a botanical artist who worked at the Jardin du Roi in Paris. His work attracted the attention of botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, who commissioned Aubriet as illustrator of Tournefort's 1694 Elemens de Botanique. From 1700 to 1702 he accompanied Tournefort on an expedition to the Middle East where he performed botanical drawings of the region's flora. Afterwards, Aubriet continued to work with other botanists at the Jardin du Roi. 

TOURNEFORT, Joseph Pitton(Claude AUBRIET, illustrator). Elemens de botanique, ou methode pour connoître les plantes. Paris, Imprimerie Royale, 1694. 8vo. With 3 engraved title pages, engraved royal arms on the title page, 2 engraved headpieces, 2 engraved initials and 451 engraved botanical plates.Early 19th-century red morocco, [1 blank], [18], 562, [20] pp.

Tournefort’s interest in botany began early, but only after the death of his father, who was forcing him toward the priesthood, was he able to drop theology and study botany. He became a physician to support himself but continued his botanical studies. In 1688 he received an appointment as professor at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, a position he held until his death. He collected many plant spe
cies on scientific expeditions to the Pyrenees, Asia Minor, and Greece and acquired a wide reputation for his botanical works, particularly the beautifully illustrated Éléments de botanique (1694).

Tournefort placed primary emphasis on the classification of genera, basing his classification entirely upon the structure of the flower and fruit. He excelled in observation and description, and some of his generic descriptions are still acceptable. He was less innovative in theory, however, for he denied the sexuality of plants, and the classifications that he put forward above the level of the genus were often artificial. By his use of a single Latin name for the genus, followed by a few descriptive words for the species, he provided a major step in the development of the binomial nomenclature—that is, the use of a two-word Latin name to denote each species.

SOURCE

Tournefort's system of classifying plants is based on the form of the corolla. Up to about 1750 the system was in high repute, being accepted even by Linnæus, but as research advanced it lost its importance. Of permanent importance are the clear distinction Tournefort makes between genus and species, and the exhaustive analyses of genera which he was the first to draw up and illustrate. Linnæus says of him: "Primus characteres genericos condidit." He expounded his system in his "Eléments de botanique" (3 vols. in 8°, Paris, 1694), containing 451 plates; rewritten in Latin as "Institutiones rei herbariæ" (3 vols., Paris, 1700), with 476 plates (in 1703 a supplement was issued containing thirteen plates; a new edition by Adrien de Jussieu in 1719; English tr., London, 1735, French tr., Lyons, 1797). The "Institutiones" was preceded by a defence of his system which was entitled, "De optima methode instituenda in re herbaria" (Paris, 1697), and by a "Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris" (Paris, 1698), an English translation of which appeared in 1732. A genus with about 120 species, belonging to the family of the Borraginaceæ, was named by Linnæus Tournefortia, and still retains this designation.

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort Associate(s)

Isnard, A. P. D. d' (1663-1743)

Plumier, Charles (1646-1704) (specimens from)

Salvador y Pedrol, Jaime (1649-1740) (co-collector)

Vaillant, Sébastien (Sebastian) (1669-1722) (student, co-collector)

Sherard, William (1659-1728) (student)

[1] NOTE FOR THE CURIOUS: Robert Morison was fatally injured by the pole of a carriage as he was crossing the street on 9 November 1683 and died the following day at his house in Green Street, Leicester-fields. This incident was very similar to the accident that killed Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. After having been struck in the chest by a carriage in September in rue Coupeau near the garden Jardin du Roi in Paris, Dr Joseph Pitton de Tournefort died on 28 December 1708.

The Scottish botanist Robert Morison, born in Aberdeen in 1620, was intended by his parents for a career in the Church but was wounded in the Civil War battle of the Bridge of Dee in 1644, fighting on the royalist side. He fled to France where he studied medicine and graduated MD in 1648 at Angers. Recommended by Louis XIV’s botanist, he became a physician in the household of Gaston d’Orleans (1608-1660), the uncle of the King, but his main focus seems to have been working in the Duke’s garden at Blois. From there he travelled extensively throughout France in search of new species for the garden and refining his ideas on plant classification. Returning to England at the invitation of the newly restored Charles II (1630-1685), he became royal physician and Professor of Botany in Oxford in 1669. One of his first publications for the newly revived University Press was the Hortus Regius Blesensis (1669) , the catalogue of the Blois garden to which Morison added the description of 260 previously un-described plants, although Pulteney (1781) says many were only varieties and others were already well known.

Morison drew much criticism from his contemporaries as he stated that he had derived his schema from the book of Nature alone and did not mention his debt to Cesalpino whose system he closely followed. Nor did he cite his works even though a heavily annotated copy of Cesalpino’s De Plantis is in the Oxford Botanic gardens which according to Vines (1913) can only have been by Morison. Linnaeus who used Morison’s figures as the type for 40 of his names gives a balanced assessment in a letter of 1737 to Haller quoted by Vines:

Morison was vain, yet he cannot be sufficiently praised for having revived system which was half expiring. If you look through Tournefort’s genera you will readily admit how much he owes to Morison, full as much as the latter was indebted to Cesalpino though Tournefort himself was a conscientious investigator. All that is good in Morison is taken from Cesalpino, from whose guidance he wanders in pursuit of natural affinities rather than of characters.’