Horace Bénédict Alfred Moquin-Tandon

Certains spirits carries flowers, others of the fruits; that of Mr. Moquin-Tandon produced, with an equal fruitfulness, the flowers of the literature and the fruits of science.

Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys (1805-1881)

Christian Horace Bénédict Alfred Moquin-Tandon , born with Montpellier the May 7th 1804 and died in Paris the April 15th 1863, is a Botaniste, Médecin and writer French.

He starts to work like simple copyist and cash clerk in the commercial firm Moquin-Tandon and company. He studies in particular near the botanist Michel Felix Dunal (1789-1856) and obtains his title of science doctor on December 9th 1826, then of doctor of medicine on August 18th 1828. He is professor of Zoologie to the Athénée of Marseilles of 1829 with 1830, then professor of Natural history to the Faculty of Science of Toulouse of 1833 with 1838, then professor of botany in this same faculty of 1838 with 1852, while teaching and directing the Botanical garden of 1834 with 1852. Lastly, he teaches the medical natural history in Paris starting from 1853.

In September 1834, it goes on a journey a few weeks in Paris. In addition to the two personalities which it had come to consult in Paris, the chemist Louis Jacques Thénard and the minister François Guizot, it meets a great number of scientists: Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844), Pierre Marcel All Saints' day de Serres (v. 1780-1862), Marie Jean-Pierre Flourens (1794-1867), Augustin Pyrame de Candolle (1778-1841), Andre-Marie Amp (1775-1836), Victor Cousin (1792-1867), Adolphe Brongniart (1801-1876). It draws an account from this short stay where its remarks all are not eulogistic: “I noticed that many of these Sirs were extremely below their reputation. The usurpation of the genius is rather common to Paris. ” This account was republished in 1999.

He is elected maintenor of the Académie of the floral Plays in 1844. He goes on a Corsica journey in in 1850. He is elected member of the Academy of Science in 1854. He pronounces the praise of André Marie Constant Duméril (1774-1860) before the medical college of Paris. In addition to his work in botany, one owes him of research on the Mollusque S and the Sangsue S.

Moquin-Tandon uses several pseudonyms in particular to carry out literary hoaxes. It makes appear with Toulouse in 1836 Carya magalonlensis :

Moquin-Tandon was not satisfied to simulate a manuscript of the beginning of the fourteenth century, to invent it , in Romance language, of speaking the language which one then spoke in Montpellier; but, to still mislead the perspicacity of the most tested criticisms, it made draw its work only with fifty specimens, carefully numbered. It decorated it of a facsimiled of the handwritten alleged original, and itself lithographed, gilded and colored these fifty specimens.

The illusion was so complete that specialists in the Romance language were mistaken there. Today, he is often regarded as pertaining to the category of the “insane arts persons”. Augustin Pyrame de Candolle made of him this portrait:

Mr. Moquin who was with Belanger in my herbarium is very opposed to his character. It is an active, hard man and who has easy work. It came to study Chénopodées and close families and since published on this family an excellent monograph. It has all Languedocien promptness and amused us much by reading us a small work of its composition in the language of the troubadours presumedly found with Maguelonne and made rather well in the kind to have been able to mislead Mr. Rainouard.

List partial of the publications

Memories on oology, or eggs of the animals (Paris, 1824).
Test on the dédoublemens or multiplications of bodies in the plants (Montpellier, 1826).
Monograph of the family of Hirudinées (Gabon, Paris, 1827).
With Philip Barker Webb (1793-1854) and Sabin Berthelot (1794-1880), Natural history of the Canary islands (Paris, 1836-1844).
Chenopodearum monographica enumeratio (P. - J. Loss, Paris, 1840).
Moquin-Tandon directs the publication of two volumes of Las Flors LED gay saber… (Toulouse, 1841).
Elements of vegetable teratology, or shortened History of the anomalies of the organization in the plants (P. - J. Loss, Paris, 1841) - the work is translated into German by Johannes Conrad Schauer (1813-1848), Pflanzen-Teratology, Lehre von dem regelwidrigen Wachsen und Bilden der Pflanzen (Haude and Spener, Berlin, 1842).
Natural history of terrestrial and fluviatile molluscs of France, container of the general studies on their anatomy and their physiology and the particular description of the kinds, the species and the varieties (three volumes, J. - B. Baillière, Paris, 1855).
Elements of medical zoology, containing the description of the animals useful for medicine and the harmful species to the man (J. - B. Baillière, Paris, 1860, republished in 1862).
Elements of medical botany, containing the description of the plants useful for medicine and the harmful species to the man (J. - B. Baillière, Paris, 1861, republished in 1866).
Under the pseudonym Alfred Frédol Le Monde of the sea (printing works of E. Trip hammer, Paris, 1863, republished by L. Hatchet, 1865, then in 1866 and 1881).
a naturalist in Paris republished in 1999 by Sciences in situation, collection “Direction of the history”, 163 p.

Sources

Pierre Cabard and Bernard Chauvet (2003). Etymology of the names of birds. Belin and Natural Éveil (Paris): 589 p. (its note contains the erroneous indication that Moquin-Tandon reaches a pulpit of the national Muséum of natural history whereas it is about one pulpit at the medical college).
Benoit Dayrat (2003). Botanists and Flora of France, three centuries of discoveries. scientists Publication of the national Natural history museum of natural history: 690 p.
Amédée Dechambre (1880). encyclopedic Dictionary of medical sciences , second series, volume ninth. G. Masson (Paris).

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