Hippolyte Coste

See also: Coste

Hippolyte Jacques Coste is a priest and a Botaniste French, born the Balaguier-on-Rancid in Aveyron and dead December 20th 1858 with the November 23rd 1924 with Saint-Paul-of-Font.

Wire of peasants, it enters in Small Séminiaire of Belmont-sur-Rance in 1870. A light handicap which prevents it from taking again the family farm encourages it to move towards the priesthood. In 1878, it enters to the Great Seminar of Rodez.

Impassioned by nature and particularly by the plants, he herborizes for a long time. He meets in 1882, the canon Joseph Revel (1811-1887), of Villefranche-with-Rouergue which convinces it to carry out a Herbier France. It is ordered priest the December 20th 1884.

The following year, Costes becomes professor with the Saint-Joseph college of Villefranche-of-Rouergue, he also enters to the botanical Société of France. In 1886, he becomes vicar with Monclar. It makes appear its first scientific publication in the Bulletin of the botanical Company of France . He refuses the proposal of Gaston Bonnier (1851-1922) to carry out a illustrated Flore of France.

In 1890, after an attempt missed by installation with Toulouse, Coste is named vicar with Holy-Eulalie-with-Cernon then, in 1894, with Saint-Paul-of-Font where its load leaves him less time for its botanical occupations. The more so as during the year, it becomes cleaned of this parish. It will remain twenty-seven years there.

It is the editor and botanist amateur of Geneva Paul Klincksieck which calls upon Coste. Klincksieck wants to take as a starting point the American flora carried out Nathaniel Lord Britton (1859-1934) and Addison Brown (1830-1913) and under the title An Illustrated Flora off the Northern United-States, Canada, and the British Possessions to carry out a flora on the same principle for France. It is via the botanical Company of France that Klincksieck meets Coste. This one delivers the first part of its work in 1900 and the end in 1906. The drawings are carried out by various draftsmen on the basis of specimen selected by Coste. The Flore of France starts to appear in June 1900 and is completed in December 1906. It is illustrated of 4.800 original figures of a high degree of accuracy. They will be often re-used in other works. This flora will be a reference book for many generations of botanists and remains a work impossible to circumvent still today. Republished in 1995, it is supplemented and corrected by six supplements published in 1984 - 1985.

Patient starting from 1916, it dies in 1924 in his presbytery of Saint-Paul-of-Font. Its Herbier is held by the Company of the letters, sciences and arts of Aveyron and is preserved at herbaria MPU at the Institute of Botany of the University Montpellier 2. A statue at summer set up in front of its church.

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