19th-century French botanists

Louis Alexandre Mangin (8 September 1852, in Paris – 27 January 1937) was a French botanist and mycologist.
In 1873, he became an associate professor at the Lycée de Nancy, followed by a professorship at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris (1881–1904). During this time frame, he was also a lecturer on natural sciences at the Sorbonne (from 1890). From 1904 to 1931, he was a professor (Chaire de cryptogamie) at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, and was director of the museum from 1919 until his retirement in 1931. For several years he was director of the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes (1920 to 1926).
Mangin was a member of the Académie des sciences, the Académie d'agriculture de France, the Académie des sciences coloniales and the Société mycologique de France.
His early research dealt largely with plant anatomy and physiology; his doctoral thesis involving the adventitious roots of monocotyledons. With Gaston Bonnier (1853–1922), he performed extensive research of plant respiration, transpiration and carbon assimilation. In the early 1890s he is credited with the discovery of callose, a fundamental substance found in the cell membrane of plants.

Henri Lecoq (18 April 1802 – 4 August 1871) was a French botanist. Charles Darwin mentioned this name in 1859 in the preface of his famous book On The Origin of Species as a believer in the modification of species. Darwin wrote:
A well-known French botanist, M. Lecoq, writes in 1854 ('Etudes sur Géograph. Bot.,' tom. i. p. 250), 'On voit que nos recherches sur la fixité ou la variation de l'espèce, nous conduisent directement aux idées émises, par deux hommes justement célèbres, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire et Goethe.' Some other passages scattered through M. Lecoq's large work, make it a little doubtful how far he extends his views on the modification of species.
The work referenced by Darwin is Lecoq's "Étude de la Géographie Botanique de l’Europe", published in 1854.
A number of plants carry the name of Lecoq in their descriptive names (see IPNI search). Also in 1829, botanist DC. published Lecokia, a monotypic genus of flowering plants belonging to the family Apiaceae with its name honouring him.In addition a museum in his home town of Clermont Ferrand (France) is named after him.

Dr. Édouard Marie Heckel (March 24, 1843 – January 20, 1916) was a French botanist and medical doctor, and director of the Jardin botanique E.M. Heckel in Marseille.
Heckel was born in Toulon, studied pharmacy and medicine, and in 1861 visited the Caribbean and Australia. In 1875, he was appointed professor in the faculty of sciences at Marseille, and in 1877 professor of medicine. He became a professor of natural history in Nancy in 1878, and is known for his studies of tropical plants and their use as medicinal plants and oilseeds.
From 1885, Heckel turned to the study of tropical plants such as medicinal or industrial oilseeds. In 1893 he founded the Colonial Institute and Museum of Marseille and creates a tropical pathology professorship at the medical school.
In 1887, he won the Prix Barbier from the French Academy of Sciences.In 1896, French botanist Jean Baptiste Louis Pierre named a genus of flowering plants (belonging to the family Meliaceae) from western central Tropical Africa, Heckeldora in his honour.In 1901, he launched the idea of creating an exhibition devoted exclusively to French colonies. This project would be supported by Jules Charles-Roux, who would become the Commissioner General while Heckel was his deputy. The exhibition was held at Parc Chanot in Marseille and was a great success from its opening on April 14, 1906 to its closure Nov. 18, 1906.

Alfred Grandidier (20 December 1836 – 13 September 1921) was a French naturalist and explorer.
From a very wealthy family, at the age of 20, he and his brother, Ernest Grandidier (1833–1912), undertook a voyage around the world. At first they were led by the astronomer and physicist Pierre Jules César Janssen (1824–1907), but when Janssen fell sick and had to return to France after about six months, the brothers continued the journey.
They visited South America in 1858 and 1859 and in particular the Andes, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil. During this voyage they gathered a significant collection of specimens which were analyzed, in 1860, by Ernest.
The two brothers parted ways after this. Ernest Grandidier went to China and collected a vast number of specimens which are now in the Louvre and the Guimet museum. Alfred travelled to India, reaching it in 1863. He had intended to explore the high plateau of Tibet, but was prevented by a severe attack of fever.
Grandidier travelled to Zanzibar to recuperate, remaining some time and making important collections and publishing an account of his findings. He then visited the island of Réunion and in 1865 made his first visit to Madagascar. He became devoted to the study of the island, revisiting in 1866 and 1868. He finally returned permanently to France in 1870. During his explorations he crossed the island three times, travelling 3000 kilometers in the interior and 2500 along the coast. He made observations which resulted in the production of a map of the island used in future expeditions.

After returning to France he began to work on his great work, L'Histoire physique, naturelle et politique de Madagascar. This work was undertaken in cooperation with others such as Alphonse Milne-Edwards and Leon Vaillant. This work ran to 40 volumes, the final volumes published posthumously by his son Guillaume Grandidier. He described about 50 new species of reptiles and amphibians.Alfred Grandidier's work drew the attention of the French government to Madagascar, which it would annex at the end of 1890.
He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1885 and was the president of the French Geographical Society from 1901 to 1905. The Royal Geographical Society awarded him their Founder's Medal in 1906.

Dominique Alexandre Godron (25 March 1807 - 16 August 1880) was a French physician, botanist, geologist and speleologist born in the town of Hayange, in the département Moselle.
Godron studied medicine at the University of Strasbourg, and during his career distinguished himself in natural sciences as well as in the field of medicine. In 1854 he became dean and professor of natural history to the Faculty of Sciences at Nancy. Here he established a natural history museum and reorganized its botanical garden (now the Jardin Dominique Alexandre Godron, renamed in his honor).
Among his numerous writings were a publication on the flora of the Lorraine region of France called "Flore de Lorraine" (1843), and the three-volume "Flore de France", a work on flora native to France and Corsica that was co-written with botanist Jean Charles Marie Grenier (1808-1875). In addition to his botanical works, he published a number of studies in the field of ethnology.Before Mendel, he discovered the main features of hybridation. In "de l'Espece et des races dans les êtres organises" he also demonstrated that hybridization in the vegetal world was, against the dominant thinking at the time, similar to hybridization in the animal world. He finally demonstrated the unity of mankind in his book dedicated to our species.
In 1846, he was honoured by botanists Jean Baptiste Mougeot and Joseph Henri Léveillé who named Godronia, which is a genus of fungi in the family Helotiaceae. Then in 1927, William Webster Diehl and Edith Katherine Cash published Godroniopsis, which is also a genus of fungi in the family Helotiaceae.

Joseph Duval-Jouve (7 August 1810 – 25 August 1883) was a French botanist born in Boissy-Lamberville. He was the father of histologist Mathias-Marie Duval (1844-1907).
He taught classes at the college in Grasse (1832–52), afterwards serving as an academic inspector in Algiers, Strasbourg and Montpellier. A portion of his herbarium was donated to the faculty of sciences at Montpellier.
He specialized in research of the family Poaceae and the genus Equisetum. The plant genus Jouvea is named in his honor. He is the taxonomic authority for the grass genus Loretia.

Pierre Étienne Simon Duchartre (27 October 1811, Portiragnes – 5 November 1894, Meudon) was a French botanist.
He studied biology in Toulouse, where after graduation he worked as a teacher. From 1837 he taught classes in Fumel, several years later moving to Paris, where in 1848 he was accepted by the faculty of sciences. During the following year, he was appointed a professor of botany and plant physiology at the Institut agronomique in Versailles. In 1861 he attained the chair of botany at the Sorbonne.In 1854 he was co-founder of the Société Botanique de France, an institution in which he served as president on several separate occasions.In 1850 he experimented with sulfur as a remedy against powdery mildew, a fungus that had a serious negative impact on European grapes during the mid-19th century. The genus Duchartrea (family Gesneriaceae) was named in his honor by botanist Joseph Decaisne. He is the binomial author of many species from the botanical family Aristolochiaceae.

Pierre Paul Dehérain (19 April 1830 in Paris – 7 December 1902) was a French plant physiologist and agricultural chemist. He was notably the doctoral advisor of the Nobel Prize winner Henri Moissan.
He served as an assistant at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers in Paris, then at the age of 26, began work as a professor at the Collège Chaptal. He obtained his LSc degree in 1856 under Edmond Frémy. Later on, he taught classes in agricultural chemistry at the agricultural school in Grignon, and in 1880, became a professor of plant physiology at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. In 1887 he was elected a member of the Académie des sciences.As a plant physiologist, he studied the absorption of carbon dioxide by plants and the effect of artificial light, especially ultraviolet rays, on plants. He showed that plants do not absorb only those minerals that are beneficial, as previously thought, but absorb all of them and then use those that they need – so that consumption regulates absorption. He discovered respiration by plant roots and investigated the effect of different minerals on the growth of fruits. He also studied effect of crop rotation on soil quality.
The plant genus Deherainia from the family Theophrastaceae is named after him.

Lucien Louis Daniel (1 November 1856 – 26 December 1940) was a French botanist. He was a professor of applied botany at the University of Rennes. His speciality was grafting.
He is the binomial author of a plant species in the family Rosaceae: Pirocydonia winkleri L.L.Daniel ex Bois, an asexual artificial hybrid. (Revue Horticole. Paris. 1914, n. s. xiv. 27)
In 1904 he was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society.

Ernest Saint-Charles Cosson (22 July 1819 – 31 December 1889) was a French botanist born in Paris.
Cosson is known for his botanical research in North Africa, and during his career he participated in eight trips to Algeria. In several of these he was accompanied by Henri-René Le Tourneux de la Perraudière (1831–1861), whom he honoured in the naming of several species and genera (e.g., Perralderia, Galium perralderii). In 1863 he was elected president of the Société botanique de France, and from 1873 to 1889, he was a member of the Académie des sciences.In 1882 Jules Ferry, as Minister of Public Instruction, decided to create a mission to explore the Regency of Tunisia.
The expedition was headed by Cosson and included the botanist Napoléon Doumet-Adanson and other naturalists.
In 1884 a geological section under Georges Rolland was added to the Tunisian Scientific Exploration Mission.
Rolland was assisted by Philippe Thomas from 1885 and by Georges Le Mesle in 1887.With Jacques Nicolas Ernest Germain de Saint-Pierre (1815–1882), Cosson published the influential Atlas de la Flore des Environs de Paris.Botanical specimens collected by Cosson are held in many herbaria around the world, including the National Museum of Natural History, France, Harvard University Herbaria, the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the National Herbarium of Victoria at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Copenhagen University Botanical Museum, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Komarov Botanical Institute, among others.