Charles Bonnet (naturalist)

See also: Bonnet

Charles Bonnet (March 13rd 1720, Geneva - May 20th 1793, Geneva) is a biologist and Swiss philosopher who described the Parthénogenèse.

Protestant woman of French origin, her family had to flee France after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. After some studies of right which hardly interested it, Charles Bonnet was discovered a great passion for biology following the reading of the Spectacle of nature of the abbot Christmas-Antoine Pluche (1688-1761) and especially of work of Réaumur (1683-1757). Very quickly, as of 18 years, it establishes a correspondence with this last.

Bonnet is impassioned for the reproduction of the Puceron S and obtains eleven successive generations without least fecundation. He also studies the breathing of the caterpillar S and the butterflies, the anatomy of the Tænia, the faculty of reconstitution of the bodies lost in the worms. He becomes member of the Royal Society the November 17th 1743.

He publishes in 1745 a Traité insectology which is worth the merit to him to be allowed as correspondent with the Academy of Science of Paris. In 1754, it makes appear the Traité on the use of the sheets which makes the admiration of Cuvier (1769-1832): It is one of most important for science than the eighteenth century produced .

But its research is blocked by blindness. Not being able more to make use of microscope, it is directed towards theoretical biology. It composed several philosophical writings: Test of psychology , 1754; analytical Test on faculties of the heart , 1760.

It publishes in 1762, its Considérations on the organized bodies where it exposes its theory on the preexistence of the germs. For him, the production of a new living being is due to the evolution of a preexistent germ. This theory makes it possible to explain the appearance of the beings without contradicting the Bible, all the germs having been created at the time of the Genèse.

In 1764, it makes appear its Contemplation of the nature which is worth a great fame to him, including apart from the scientific circles.

But its most ambitious work is undoubtedly its philosophical Palingénésie (1769) in which it continues an idea of Leibniz. It defends there the immortality of the heart of the human being but also of that of the animals. It is a vast test where it draws with very vast knowledge like geology, biology, psychology and metaphysics to describe the life on Earth and its future.

It continues this reinterpretation of the Genèse in the philosophical Recherches on the evidence of Christianity of 1773.

Its work is worth to him the sarcastic remarks of Voltaire.

In its treaties on nature, it attempts to show that all the beings form an uninterrupted scale; that all come from preexistent germs, etc In its treaties of metaphysics, it grants a great part to the brain and the organization, but without falling, as one showed it, in the Matérialisme and the Fanatisme. Quite to the contrary, it was deeply monk: it stained to establish in its Palingénésie the need for another life, not only for the man, but also for the same animals.

The life of Charles Bonnet is deprived of big events. It never seems not to have left Switzerland, nor to have taken share with the public affairs except for the period ranging between 1752 and 1768, during which he was member of the council of the Republic. It spent the twenty-five last years of its life in its peaceful country retirement of Genthod, close to Geneva, where it died of the continuations of long and painful disease the May 20th 1793. His wife came from the family Of Bank. The couple did not have children, but they raised as their son Horace-Bénédict de Saussure who was the nephew of bonnet Madam.

Its contribution to the history of medicine

In 1760 it reports the observation of his/her 87 years old grandfather and reached of a severe cataract, which in spite of a chump end Cécité complained about elaborate and realistic visual Hallucination S: he said to perceive characters, birds and various more or less complex reasons. Charles Bonnet left his name to this syndrome, in which the majority of the people reached are old subjects presenting a deficit of the vision whatever is the origin.

Works

Its works were published with Neuchâtel, 1779, 8 volumes, in-4 or 18 volumes in-8.
One owes with Albert Lemoine (1824-1874) a Étude on Bonnet (1850), and to the duke Victor-Antoine-Charles de Riquet de Caraman (1811-1868): Charles Bonnet, his life and its works (1859).
Treated insectology or Observations on some species of fresh water worms, which crossed per pieces, become complete animals as many .

Source

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