Bernard de Jussieu

Bernard de Jussieu (1699 to 1777) was a French naturalist, the younger brother of Antoine de Jussieu. Born in Lyon, he took a medical degree at Montpellier and began to practise in 1720 but found the work uncongenial, so he accepted his brother's invitation to Paris in 1722 and succeeded Sebastien Vaillant as sub-demonstrator of plants in the Jardin des Plantes. In 1725 he brought out a new edition of Tournefort's Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris, and he was admitted that year to the French Academy of Sciences. Long before Abraham Trembley, he held that freshwater polyps were animals rather than the flowers of marine plants, and he travelled three times to the Normandy coast to confirm it. Modest and retiring, he published very little, but in 1759 he laid out the plants of the royal garden at the Trianon by his own scheme of classification, which his nephew Antoine Laurent de Jussieu later printed as the basis of Genera plantarum. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1749.