The Goujaud Bonpland brothers: two complementary approaches of botanical knowledge

Abstract

French botanists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries deeply influenced the discovery and description of plant diversity in the Neotropics. Most of them studied medicine or pharmacy, for which systematics and comparative morphology played an extremely important role in the comprehension of useful plants. Some of them took courses by the most renowned European botanists and later themselves became the foremost scientists in charge of naming the plant diversity of most American countries. This article highlights the major contributions of the Goujaud Bonpland brothers to botany and describes the different ways they influenced the natural sciences at a local, regional and planetary scale.