Jean-François Séguier

Jean-François Séguier is a Botaniste French, born the November 25th 1703 with Nimes and dead on September 1st 1784 in this same town of an attack of apoplexy.

Biography

He is the son of an adviser of the présidial. He makes his studies with the college Jesuit of Nimes and impassions himself very early for the Numismatique like for the Natural history. He leaves to Montpellier to study the right there but he follows especially the lessons of botany of Pierre Baux (1708-1790) and Aymé-François Chicoyneau (1702-1740). The marquis Scipion Maffei (1675-1755) visiting the city in 1732 meets the young man and obtains from his father that it accompanies it during his voyages. The two men tie a friendship then that only death could separate.

He visits the Jardin of the king in Paris and meets Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738) in Holland. They also travel in Austria and Italy where Séguier multiply the observations naturalists and archaeological. He makes appear in 1740, with $the Hague, Bibliotheca botanica then of 1745 with 1754 his Plantæ Veronenses . But it in the long term does not carry out a bearing project on the Fossile S which it had observed around Véronèse. In 1755, having lost his/her friend, it decides to leave the Italy and to come to settle with Nimes. It brings back with him a rich person collection of medals, books, specimens natural, minerals, fruit of twenty-three years of labor.

Séguier devotes himself to the study of the monuments of old the Nemausus , his birthplace, in particular with the Maison Carrée. Old Roman temple, built with the turning of the Christian era, between 5 av. J. - C. and 5 a. J. - C. by Marcus Vipsanius Clutched, the son-in-law of the emperor Auguste, the building related to its Frontispice, registered in bronze letters sealed in the stone, a dedication explaining its role. These letters then disappeared! The holes of sealing are still visible. It is thanks to the provision of these holes that the large scholar nîmois Jean-François Séguier managed in 1758 to recompose the original text. That said this: “ has Caius consul and Lucius appointed consul, wire of Auguste, princes of youth ”.

He finishes an important bearing manuscript on the Latin inscriptions, Inscriptionum antiquarum index absolutissimus, in quo græcarum latinarumque inscriptionum quæ in editis libris reperiri potuerunt PRIMA verba describuntur, etc, Etruscarum and exoticarum index AD calcem adjecto , in eight volumes but this work is not published. It is named free associate of the Académie of the inscriptions and the humanities in 1772.

It maintains a rich person correspondence with the scientists his time and exerts a considerable influence on young people of its city. It receives the visit of the many intellectuals like the naturalists Antoine Gouan (1733-1821) or Dominique Villars (1745-1814). Today forgotten, Séguier is an essential figure of the intellectual life of the 18th century.

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