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Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland (22 August 1773 - 4 May 1858) was a French explorer and botanist.
Bonpland's real name was Goujaud, and he was born in La Rochelle, a coastal city in France. After serving as a surgeon in the French army, and studying under J. N. Corvisart at Paris, he accompanied Alexander von Humboldt during five years of travel in Mexico, Colombia and the districts bordering on the Orinoco and Amazon rivers. In these explorations he collected and classified about 60 000 plants that were, until then, mostly unknown in Europe. He later described his finds in Plantes equinoxiales (Paris, 1808-1816). A semi-fictional account of these travels is to be found in Daniel Kehlmann's Die Vermessung der Welt (also published in American English as Measuring the World: A Novel, translated by Carol Brown Janeway).
On returning to Paris he received a pension and the superintendence of the gardens at Malmaison, and published Monographie des Melastomes (1806), and Description des plantes rares cultivées à Malmaison et à Navarre (1813). In 1816 he set out, taking with him various European plants, for Buenos Aires, where he was elected professor of natural history, an office which he soon left in order to explore central South America. While journeying to Bolivia he was arrested in 1821, by command of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the dictator of Paraguay, who detained him until 1831.
On regaining liberty he resided at San Borga in the province of Corrientes, Argentina until his removal in 1853 to Santa Ana, in Misiones, today a small town called "Bonpland" in his honor, close to Restauracion where he died.
Bonpland Street in the ritzy Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo Hollywood lies among streets named after Charles Darwin, Robert FitzRoy and Alexander von Humboldt. Many animals and plants are also named in his honor, including the squid Grimalditeuthis bonplandi and the orchid Ornithocephalus bonplandi.
The lunar crater Bonpland is named after him.
External links
- View biographical information in Australian National Botanic Gardens
- View biographical information on and digitized titles by Aimė Bonpland in Botanicus.org
References
- ^ Brummitt, R. K.; C. E. Powell (1992). Authors of Plant Names. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. ISBN 1-84246-085-4.
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 8 October 2008, at 22:27.
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