Brongniart, Adolphe-Théodore

Adolphe-Théodore Brongniart, (born Jan. 14, 1801, Paris, Fr.—died Feb. 18, 1876, Paris), French botanist whose classification of fossil plants, which drew surprisingly accurate relations between extinct and existing forms prior to Charles Darwin’s principles of organic evolution, earned him distinction as the founder of modern paleobotany. Brongniart is also known for his valuable contributions to angiosperm (flowering plant) morphology, especially for his account of pollen development and pollen tube formation (1827).

In 1831 Brongniart became an assistant to the botanist René Desfontaines at the National Museum of Natural History, Paris, and two years later succeeded his teacher to the museum chair that he held for the rest of his life. He began publication in 1822 of a series of papers dealing with the classification and distribution of fossil plants. By 1828, when he wrote the Prodrome d’une histoire des végétaux fossiles, followed by his Histoire des végétaux fossiles, 2 vol. (1828–37), he had developed an orderly system of fossil plant classification that distinguished four successive groups of dominant plant forms, from the first land plants to the present. Despite his belief in a fundamental fixity of species, his division of existing plant life into six classes approached modern phytogeny.

Unfortunately, Brongniart had abandoned this system by 1843, when he classified the museum’s collections according to his modified version of the Swiss botanist Pyrame de Candolle’s taxonomy. Nevertheless, innovations introduced by Brongniart at that time, such as the treatment of gymnosperms as a distinct group and a distinction made between the fertilized egg and the seed, proved valuable to later attempts at plant classification, especially the widely adopted taxonomy of August Eichler and Adolf Engler.