De Candolle

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

AUGUSTIN PY- RAME (de-kon-dol'), a Swiss botanist, descended from an ancient noble family of Provence; born in Geneva, Feb. 4, 1778. In 1796-1797 he studied chemistry, physics, and botany in Paris, where in 1797 his earliest work, on lichens, was published. Other works quickly followed, including his "Astragalogia" (1802), and "Essays on the Medicinal Properties of Plants" (1804). In 1802 he was elected to an honorary professorship in the Academy of Geneva, and delivered his first botanical lectures in the Collège de France in 1804. His "French Flora" appeared in 1805. Employed by the government, he visited all parts of France and Italy in 1806-1812, investigating their botany and agriculture. He was appointed in 1807 to a chair at Montpellier, where he lived from 1810 to 1816; he then retired to Geneva where a Professorship of Botany was founded for him, and where he spent the remainder of his life. He died Sept. 9, 1841. Among his greatest works is "Natural System of the Vegetable Kingdom" (vols. i. and ii., 1818-1821). It was commenced on too grand a scale, but continued within more reasonable limits in the "Preliminary View of the National System of the Vegetable Kingdom" (17 vols. 1824-1873, the last De Candolle 10 by his died in 1841, bequeathing his collections -including a herbarium of more than 70,000 species of plants-to his son, ALPHONSE DE CANDOLLE (born 1806). That son, himself a botanist of wide fame, also published several works of note, the most important being "Geographical Botany" (2 vols. 1855), and "Origin of Cultivated Plants" (1883). He also edited the "Memoirs" of his father (1862). He died April 9, 1893. DECAPODA. (1) The highest order of crustaceans, so called from having five pairs of legs. They are sub-divided into brachyura , the short-tailed decapods or crabs; macrura, or long-tailed, including the shrimp , lobster, prawn, crayfish, etc.; and anomura, of which the hermit-crab is an example. (2) One of the two divisions of the dibranchiate cuttlefishes (the other being the octopoda). They have two arms longer than the other eight, and bear the suctorial disks only at the extremities.