The natural history of ants : from an unpublished manuscript in the archives of the Academy of Sciences of Paris / by René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur ; translated and annotated by William Morton Wheeler.

  • René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The natural history of ants : from an unpublished manuscript in the archives of the Academy of Sciences of Paris / by René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur ; translated and annotated by William Morton Wheeler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    find the leading departments of biology, and therefore also of entomology, established, and extraordinary specialists ar¬ dently busied with their development. Lyonet (1707-1789) devotes a long life to purely morphological studies; Spal¬ lanzani (1719-1799), Trembley (1710-1784), Bonnet (172.0- I793) and later François Huber (1777-1840) 40 physiology and experimental ethology; Linnæus (1707-1778), Fabricius (1745-1808), and Latreille (1762.-1833) to classification. But Réaumur stands out conspicuously as the most comprehen¬ sive mind of the period, combining remarkable achievement in entomology with an extraordinary and fruitful industry in many other sciences — mathematics, physics, metallurgy, crystallography, meteorology, forestry and economic biology generally. His name and titles were: René-Antoine Ferchault, Écu¬ yer; Seigneur de Réaumur, des Angles et de la Bermon- dière; commander and intendant of the Royal Military Order of Saint Louis; member of the Royal Society of Great Britain, of the Academies of Sciences of France, Prussia, Russia and Sweden and of the Institute of Bologna. The most important sources for his biography are the éloge de¬ livered by the astronomer and poet Grand jean de Fouchy at the session of April 5, 1758, of the Paris Academy of Sciences,* an article by Cuvier in the Biographie Universelle, vol. 37, 1814, derived in great part from the éloge, and an important collection of Réaumur’s letters which have been overlooked by all his biographers.f Miallf has translated the more important portions of Cuvier’s article with some comments of his own [in brackets]. It seems advisable to * See l'Histoire de VAcad. Sc. Paris, 1757 (1762), p. 2.01-116. f These letters, fifty-five in number and covering the period from April 1743 to March 1757, were edited by G. Musset and published with a biographical introduction in the An¬ nales de la Société des Sciences Naturelles of the Académie des Belles-Lettres, Sciences et Arts of La Rochelle, vol. 2.1, 1884, p. 177-158, and vol. 11, 1885, p. 89-191. They were reprinted as a small volume of 183 pages in 1886. Thirty-four of them are addressed to the naturalist Jean François Séguier, the remainder in great part to the physicist Jean Baptiste Ludot (1703- 1771) and the eminent physiologist Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777). The volume also contains an inventory of the furniture of Réaumur’s chateaux. This is interesting as showing the unostentatious mode of life of a learned French nobleman in the eighteenth century. Î The Early Naturalists, their Lives and Work 0-1789), London, Macmillan & Co., 1911, p. 2.44.