Émilien Dumas

Biography

Resulting from a family of the Protestant middle-class of Gard, Émilien Dumas bathes as of her childhood in an atmosphere of scholarship and study. His/her father, a trader reconverted into agriculture, is an educated man. The flora of the Gard offers to him a first ground of investigation near Doctor Dax. Of 1815 with 1824, it studies with Morges (Suisse), then with Basle, where its passion for the natural science matures and is confirmed near the large theologist protesting Alexandre Vinet (1797-1847). It regains its native soil in 1824 at the time of the death of his mother.

Embracing a true scientific career, it gains Paris and follows the courses of the Collège de France, of the royal Collège of the mines and the national Muséum of natural history, of Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), of Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844) and of Adrien de Jussieu (1797-1853). It is seen, his training in natural science is complete, since it is plunged with an equal passion in the Zoologie, the Minéralogie and the Botanique and is in the middle of the reflections of the time which opposes Fixisme to the Transformisme of Lamarck (1744-1829).

In 1828, it regains Sommières where it marries wealthy heiress of Orange, Pauline Borel, girl of an owner of silk spinning mill. The same year, it updates the paleontological rich person site of Pondres (Gard) whose animal and human elements provide him arguments against creationism, in particular in the field of the Archéozoologie.

Land-surveyor of a expensive area in his heart, it establishes with a patience and a great tenacity, during twenty years, the geological map of the department of Gard. Born adventurer, it studies the ground of Europe of the South at the time of a long voyage in the years 1860. Untiring collector, it does not cease cultivating its curiosity, and the Muséum of natural history of Nimes preserves most of its many collections touching the Greek antiquity, the Botanique, the Géologie.

An element can supplement the portrait of this “explorer of Gard”: its taste for the theater and the dramaturgy - he does not hesitate to go up on the boards -, which is regarded by its contemporaries as incompatible with his scientific activity, but which reveals the human richness of a character cordial and attaching.

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