Flora Atlantica

A member and later president of the Acadmie des Sciences French botanist and doctor Ren Louiche Desfontaines (17501833) spent the years 17835 on an expedition to North Africa. During his time in Tunisia and Algeria he collected over a thousand plant specimens: more than three hundred genera were new to European naturalists at this time. Having succeeded Le Monnier in the chair of botany at the Jardin du Roi in 1786 Desfontaines helped found the Institut de France following the Revolution and published his two-volume Flora atlantica in Latin in 17989. A lavishly illustrated second edition appeared in four volumes in 1800. Combining its two volumes of plates into one this reissue will give modern researchers an insight into the promulgation of pioneering plant science. Volume 2 contains classes 14 to 24 in the Linnaean system of plant taxonomy from Didynamia to Cryptogamia.