Edmé-Louis Daubenton was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 naturalist

Naturalist

Naturalist may refer to:* Practitioner of natural history* Conservationist* Advocate of naturalism * Naturalist , autobiography-See also:* The American Naturalist, periodical* Naturalism...

.


Edmé-Louis Daubenton's tombstone is in the church of Saint-Pierre in Avon

Avon, Seine-et-Marne

Avon is a commune in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France.-Geography:Avon and Fontainebleau, together with three other smaller communes, form an urban area of 36,713 inhabitants...

. It was Buffon

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was a French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and encyclopedic author.His works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier...

 who engaged this cousin of Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton, Edmé-Louis, to supervise the colored illustrations for the Histoire naturelle (1749-89). The "Planches enluminées" started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 plates, all engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet

François-Nicolas Martinet

François-Nicolas Martinet was a French engineer, engraver and naturalist.Martinet engraved the plates for numerous works on natural history, especially ornithology. Notable in particular are those for l'Ornithologie de Mathurin Jacques Brisson .-External links:*...

 (1731–90), and all painted by hand. The Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

ian publisher Panckoucke

Charles-Joseph Panckoucke

Charles-Joseph Panckoucke was a French writer and publisher. He was responsible for numerous influential publications of the era, including the literary journal Mercure de France and the Encyclopédie Méthodique, a successor to the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot.Panckoucke was born in the city of...

 published a version without text between 1765 and 1783. More than 80 artists took part in the realization of the original paintings. 973 plates relate to bird

Bird

Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

s; others illustrate especially butterflies but also other insects, corals, etc. The illustrations were not very successful, but they allow a rather good determination of the illustrated species, some of them now extinct. As Buffon did not follow the system of biological nomenclature developed by Carl von Linné in 1783, Pieter Boddaert

Pieter Boddaert

Pieter Boddaert was a Dutch physician and naturalist.Boddaert was the son of a Middelburg jurist and poet by the same name . Pieter Jr. obtained his M.D. at the University of Utrecht in 1764 and there became a lecturer on natural history. Fourteen letters survive of his correspondence with Carl...

 (1730–1796) published a table of the correspondence of the names used with their Linnean binomial names.