Jussieu, Laurent de
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
zhu-se-uh', Laurent de (1748-1836), a noted French botanist. Jussieu's father was a professor of botany in the Royal Garden. His uncle was a superintendent of grounds at Versailles. Both took pride in Laurent, and helped him to a knowledge of plant classification. His Genera Plantarum, a classification of plants accepted by modern botanists, was published in 1775-89. Jussieu was rewarded by a professorship in the Garden of Plants, Paris. His work in classification was carried on by De Candolle, who worked out details and made improvements. It seems natural to divide plants into flowering and flowerless; and to divide flowering plants into those with two seed leaves and those with one seed leaf; and then to divide those with two seed leaves into plants with seed pods and those with naked seeds; those with seed pods into plants with many-petaled, one-petaled, and no-petaled flowers, and so on to the family, genus, and species; but there was a day when no such suggestion had been made and botanists were quite at sea. See De Condolle; Linnaeus Justinian I (483-565), emperor of the East. He was surnamed "the Great," His parents were Gothic peasants. His wife was an actress named Theodora. He made himself emperor in 527. He did much to restore the dignity of the empire. He was fortunate enough to have two great generals, Belisarius, who defeated the Persians and the Africans, and Narses, who put down the Ostrogoths in Italy. In 532 a fight broke out in the great hippodrome between two factions known as the Green and the Blue. The contest spread to the city and was not ended until Belisarius, taking the side of the Blues, put to death 30,000 Greens. A large part of the city, including the church of St. Sophia, afterward rebuilt, was destroyed. The reign of Justinian is remembered chiefly, however, for the publication of the Justinian Code, a codification of Roman law. It was drawn up by ten men learned in legal matters. It is considered the greatest codification ever made. It is the basis of modern law. See Code
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's in 1910 called Jussieu's Genera Plantarum "a classification of plants accepted by modern botanists" and laid out its tidy ladder of divisions; that ladder no longer holds. Molecular work has broken up the old grouping of two-seed-leaved plants (the dicotyledons), which turns out not to be a single natural group, and since 1998 flowering plants have been arranged by the DNA-based Angiosperm Phylogeny Group system, revised most recently as APG IV in 2016. What survives is Jussieu's idea of the family as a unit, and a good many of the families he named in 1789 are still in use under their old names. Two details in the sketch above also need correction: Genera Plantarum appeared in 1789, not over 1775-89, and it was his uncle Bernard, not his father, who was the eminent botanist of the family; he is now usually listed as Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu.
Written for this edition, 2026.