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

botanist Botany, also called plant science, is the branch of natural science and biology studying plants, especially Plant anatomy, their anatomy, Plant taxonomy, taxonomy, and Plant ecology, ecology. A botanist or plant scientist is a scientist who s ...

and

naturalist Natural history is a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. A person who studies natural history is cal ...

, who specialised in the sunflower family (

Asteraceae Asteraceae () is a large family (biology), family of flowering plants that consists of over 32,000 known species in over 1,900 genera within the Order (biology), order Asterales. The number of species in Asteraceae is rivaled only by the Orchi ...

) (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 (, ), a research institution of the Paris Sciences et Lettres University, is the foremost astronomical observatory of France, and one of the largest astronomical centres in the world. Its historic building is on the Left Ban ...

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

astronomer An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. Astronomers observe astronomical objects, such as stars, planets, natural satellite, moons, comets and galaxy, galax ...

Giovanni Domenico Cassini Giovanni Domenico Cassini (8 June 1625 – 14 September 1712) was an Italian-French mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and engineer. Cassini was born in Perinaldo, near Imperia, at that time in the County of Nice, part of the Savoyard sta ...

, discoverer of

Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a Jupiter mass, mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined a ...

Great Red Spot The Great Red Spot is a persistent high-pressure area, high-pressure region in the atmosphere of Jupiter, producing an anticyclonic storm that is the largest in the Solar System. It is the most recognizable feature on Jupiter, owing to its red-o ...

and the Cassini division in

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 9 times that of Earth. It has an eighth the average density of Earth, but is over 95 tim ...

's rings. The genus '' Cassinia'' was named in his honour by the botanist

Robert Brown Robert Brown may refer to: Robert Brown (born 1965), British Director, Animator and author Entertainers and artists * Washboard Sam or Robert Brown (1910–1966), American musician and singer * Robert W. Brown (1917–2009), American printmaker ...

. He named many

flowering plant Flowering plants are plants that bear flowers and fruits, and form the clade Angiospermae (). The term angiosperm is derived from the Ancient Greek, Greek words (; 'container, vessel') and (; 'seed'), meaning that the seeds are enclosed with ...

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