Count Alexandre Henri Gabriel de Cassini (9 May 1781 – 23 April 1832) was a French

botanist Botany, also called , plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek wo ...

and naturalist, who specialised in the sunflower family (

Asteraceae The family Asteraceae, alternatively Compositae, consists of over 32,000 known species of flowering plants in over 1,900 genera within the order Asterales. Commonly referred to as the aster, daisy, composite, or sunflower family, Compositae ...

) (then known as family Compositae). He was the youngest of five children of Jacques Dominique, Comte de Cassini, famous for completing the map of France, who had succeeded his father as the director of the

Paris Observatory The Paris Observatory (french: Observatoire de Paris ), a research institution of the Paris Sciences et Lettres University, is the foremost astronomical observatory of France, and one of the largest astronomical centers in the world. Its histo ...

. He was also the great-great-grandson of famous Italian-French

astronomer An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses their studies on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. They observe astronomical objects such as stars, planets, moons, comets and galaxies – in either ...

Giovanni Domenico Cassini Giovanni Domenico Cassini, also known as Jean-Dominique Cassini (8 June 1625 – 14 September 1712) was an Italian (naturalised French) mathematician, astronomer and engineer. Cassini was born in Perinaldo, near Imperia, at that time in the ...

, discoverer of

Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but slightly less than one-thousand ...

Great Red Spot The Great Red Spot is a persistent high-pressure region in the atmosphere of Jupiter, producing an anticyclonic storm that is the largest in the Solar System. Located 22 degrees south of Jupiter's equator, it produces wind-speeds up to 432&nb ...

and the

Cassini division The rings of Saturn are the most extensive ring system of any planet in the Solar System. They consist of countless small particles, ranging in size from micrometers to meters, that orbit around Saturn. The ring particles are made almost entir ...

Saturn Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius of about nine and a half times that of Earth. It has only one-eighth the average density of Earth; h ...

's rings. The genus ''

Cassinia ''Cassinia'' is a genus of about fifty-two species of flowering plants in the family Asteraceae that are native to Australia and New Zealand. Plants in the genus ''Cassinia'' are shrubs, sometimes small trees with leaves arranged alternately, a ...

'' was named in his honour by the botanist Robert Brown. He named many

flowering plant Flowering plants are plants that bear flowers and fruits, and form the clade Angiospermae (), commonly called angiosperms. The term "angiosperm" is derived from the Greek words ('container, vessel') and ('seed'), and refers to those plants t ...

s and new genera in the sunflower family (Asteraceae), many of them from North America. He published 65 papers and 11 reviews in the '' ouveauBulletin des Sciences'' of the Société Philomatique de Paris between 1812 and 1821. In 1825, Cassini placed the North American taxa of ''

Prenanthes ''Prenanthes'' is a genus of plant in the family Asteraceae, often referred to as rattlesnake root. Molecular analysis in 2009 revealed that the genus as traditionally envisioned is polyphyletic, meaning that it is a conglomeration of species ...

'' (family Asteraceae, tribe Lactuceae) in a new genus ''

Nabalus ''Nabalus'' is a genus of Asian and North American flowering plants in the tribe Cichorieae within the family Asteraceae. ''Nabalus'' is now considered the correct name for a group of plants in North America that were formerly considered to be m ...

''. In 1828 he named ''Dugaldia hoopesii'' for the Scottish naturalist Dugald Stewart (1753–1828).

References

* * King, Robert M., Paul C. Janaske, & David B. Lellinger (compilers). 1995. Cassini on Compositae II. ''Monographs in Systematic Botany from the Missouri Botanical Garden'' 54: xii, 1-190. {{DEFAULTSORT:Cassini, Alexandre de 1781 births 1832 deaths 19th-century French botanists French people of Italian descent Members of the French Academy of Sciences

See also

References