Marie Jules César Lelorgne de Savigny (French:[maʁiʒylsezaʁləlɔʁɲdəsaviɲi]; 5 April 1777 – 5 October 1851) was a French zoologist and naturalist who served on Emperor Napoleon's Egypt expedition in 1798. He published descriptions of numerous taxa and was among the first to propose that the mouth-parts of insects are derived from the jointed legs of segmented arthropods.
Life and work
Savigny was born at Provins to Jean-Jacques Lelorgne de Savigny and Françoise Josèphe de Barbaud. He was educated at the Collège des Oratoriens in classical languages with a view to becoming a priest, but learned a bit of botany and the use of microscope. He then studied with a local apothecary when he passed an exam to study in Paris at the École de Santé (school of health) in 1793. He also attended lectures at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle where he was noticed by Lamarck. Georges Cuvier suggested that he join an expedition. In 1798 he travelled to Egypt under the sponsorship of Emperor Napoleon as part of the French scientific expedition to that country and returned in 1802. He then contributed to the publication of the findings of the expedition from 1809 (Description de l'Égypte; published more fully in 1822). He wrote about the fauna in the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.[1]
By 1817, Savigny's eyesight had deteriorated, and he suffered from a nervous affliction and had to stop working for a number of years. Between 1816 and 1820 he published the important Mémoires sur les animaux sans vertèbres (Memoires on the animals without vertebrae). He had examined flowers and their parts as a botanist and applied the same approach to the details of insects. He compared the mouthparts of lepidoptera, those of crustaceans, arthropods (like the horseshoe crab) and came up with the theory (Theorie de la bouche) that there were homologies among them. He suggested in 1816 that there was a common plan. This idea was influenced others including Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. After he returned to work in 1822, his eyesight continued to worsen, and by 1824 he became more-or-less blind, with terrible "optical hallucinations". Victor Audouin offered to complete Savigny's work but Savigny refused to part with the original artwork. Savigny was elected member of the Academy of Science on 30 July 1821. From 1824 to until his death he lived a reclusive life in Versailles.[5]
^Blackwall, J. (1833). "Characters of some undescribed genera and species of Araneidae". London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (. 3 (3): 104–112.
^ abBeolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 233–234. ISBN978-1-4214-0135-5.