Linnaeus borrowed 240 bird species from a French curator who then quit zoology
When Carl Linnaeus expanded his catalogue of birds in 1766, most of the new species came straight from one French book. Its author, Mathurin Jacques Brisson, had by then walked away from animals altogether, reinventing himself as a physics professor who tutored the royal family and argued with Benjamin Franklin about electricity.
Brisson was born at Fontenay-le-Comte in the Vendée on 30 April 1723. His parents wanted him in the church, but he dropped those studies in 1747. Two years later the wealthy naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur hired him to curate the large natural history collection kept at the family seat of Réaumur.
Surrounded by specimens, he took up classification, drawing on Linnaeus and Jacob Theodor Klein. Le Règne animal appeared in 1756, followed in 1760 by the six-volume Ornithologie. Its strength was honesty: for every species he noted whether he had seen a specimen himself or was trusting another writer. The English ornithologist Alfred Newton judged him still unsurpassed as a describer of birds. His Latin species names do not follow the two-part binomial system and are not officially recognised, but the genus names he coined are accepted. For the twelfth edition of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus added 386 bird species, 240 of them based only on Brisson.
Then the collection vanished from his life. Réaumur died in 1757 and willed it to the Academy of Sciences, yet it was absorbed into the royal cabinet in Paris instead. In 1762 Brisson succeeded Jean-Antoine Nollet as physics professor at the College of Navarre. A member of the Academy of Sciences from 1759, he taught natural sciences to the monarch's family, opposed the electrical theories of Priestley and Franklin, and in 1787 published a study of the specific weight of bodies. Other titles covered balloon flight and the new metric weights and measures.
He married Marie-Denise Foliot de Foucherolles in 1775, and the couple raised three children. Death came on 23 June 1806 at Magny-les-Hameaux, close to Versailles.
Source: Mathurin Jacques Brisson
