ASTONISHING NATURALIST

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 September 1940, Page 3

ASTONISHING NATURALIST

NOTABLE & ORIGINAL THINKER. Michel Adanson, a French naturalist and scholar, was born on April 7, 1727. Remembered as one of the most notable and original thinkers France has ever had, he was left to die in extreme poverty. The pursuit of knowledge was everything to Michel. When little more than 20 he set off for Senegal in West Africa, then an almost unknown region, and in spite of the unhealthiness of the climate and the innumerable dangers close at hand, he spent six busy years studying everything about him. No hardship or setback could dishearten him. He collected and described an immense number of animals and plants. He gathered specimens of every object of commerce. He made wonderfully accurate maps and plans. He noted all variations of climate. He prepared grammars and dictionaries of the many languages and dialects spoken; and when at last he went back to France he wrote his remarkable Natural History of Senegal which appeared in 1757. This astonishing man went on to classify all living things in a way never before worked' out so thorough-, ly: and with his passion for knowledge and his genius for hard work he spent the greater part of his life preparing and elaborating a gigantic encyclopedia of a kind never before planned. With his own hand he wrote 27 huge volumes, and planned the details of 150 more volumes. This great mass of information was put before the Academy of Sciences in 1774, but the idea was never followed up, and Michel’s work was never printed. The scholar found himself with only a pittance. For all that, he went on with the idea. Nothing could stop him.

Greater misfortune and distress overtook him in the Revolution. The little pension he had was taken from him, and it is said that on one occasion he had to refuse an invitation to speak to the Institute of France because he had no shoes to wear. Towards the end of his life France gave him a small pension, but it was not enough to make life easy for him; and after much suffering he died a poor old man a year after Trafalgar. His dying wish was that flowers might be laid on his grave.