René Lesson


René Primevère Lesson was a French surgeon, naturalist, ornithologist, and herpetologist.

Biography

He was born at Rochefort, and entered the Naval Medical School in Rochefort at the age of sixteen. He served in the French Navy during the Napoleonic Wars; in 1811 he was third surgeon on the frigate Saale, and in 1813 was second surgeon on the Regulus.
In 1816 Lesson changed his classification to pharmacist. He served on Duperrey's round-the-world voyage of La Coquille, of which he collected natural history specimens with his fellow surgeon Prosper Garnot and officer Dumont d'Urville. During his visits to the Moluccas and New Guinea, Lesson became the first naturalist to see birds of paradise in the wild.
On returning to Paris, he spent seven years preparing the section on vertebrates for the official account of the expedition: "Voyage autour du monde entrepris par ordre du Gouvernement sur la corvette La Coquille". During this time period, he also produced "Manuel d'Ornithologie", "Traité d'Ornithologie", "Centurie Zoologique" and "Illustrations de Zoologie". Lesson also published several monographs on hummingbirds and one book on birds of paradise:
In the field of herpetology he described many new species of amphibians and reptiles.
On the 3rd of February 1827 he married the artist and scientific illustrator Clémence Dumont de Sainte-Croix. Dumont de Sainte-Croix along with her sister Zoë Dumont de Sainte-Croix illustrated plates in Lesson's publications.
From 1831, he served as a professor of pharmacy, and following a series of promotions, became the top-ranking naval pharmacist at Rochefort. His experience as a ship's surgeon resulted in his two-volume "Manuel d'histoire naturelle medicale, et de pharmacographie", intended as a handbook for naval surgeons.
He became a corresponding member of the Académie de Médecine in 1828, later becoming a correspondent of the Académie des Sciences. He received the Légion d'honneur in 1847.
René Primevère Lesson is sometimes confused with his brother, Pierre Adolphe Lesson, who participated on the Astrolabe expedition in 1826–29, under the command of Jules Dumont d'Urville.

Amphibian and reptile species described by Lesson

listed in the order they were described
listed in the order they were described
On his return from his voyage on the Coquille in 1825, Lesson published a French translation of “Du Grand Océan, de ses îles et de ses côtes” written by the German botanist Adelbert von Chamisso. In the article, Von Chamisso had claimed that the number system of New Zealand was based on twenty: “…de l’E. de la mer du Sud … c’est là qu’on trouve premierement le système arithmétique fondé sur un échelle de vingt, comme dans la Nouvelle-Zélande...” . Lesson inserted the footnote to mark this claim as an error: “ Erreur. Le système arithmétique des Zélandais est undécimal, et les Anglais sont les premiers qui ont propagé cette fausse idée. ” ” The term “undécimal” was possibly a printer’s error that conjoined the phrase “un decimal,” which would have correctly identified the New Zealand number system as decimal. Undecimal was interpreted to mean “counting by elevens,” as a parallel construction to the term “duodecimal” for twelve-based counting. The mention of “the English” likely referred to Samuel Lee and Thomas Kendall, as their 1820 grammar of the New Zealand language had been von Chamisso’s source.
Regardless of whether his 1825 use of “undécimal” originated as a printer’s error or not, over the next several years, Lesson and his friend and shipmate Jules de Blosseville would deliberately embellish and attempt to establish as fact the idea that New Zealand had a base 11 number system. The idea was published in 1826 by the Italian geographer Adriano Balbi as the contents of a letter he received from Lesson, a missive that added an elevens-based numerical vocabulary and details of its purported collection from New Zealand informants. It was again mentioned in 1826 by the Hungarian astronomer Franz Xaver von Zach, who reported it thirdhand as a letter written by Blosseville: “M. Nell de Bréanté écrit que, d'après les communications qu'il a reçues de M. de Blosseville, la carte des Carolines, et surtout celle de la Nouvelle-Zélande, est beaucoup changée par les observations faites dans l'expédition de la Coquille par le capitaine Duperrey. Dans cette dernière île, on a trouvé en usage un système de numération undécimal" . Lesson was also likely to have authored an undated, anonymous essay found among and published with the papers of the Prussian linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1839. The essay contains the most extensive detail of the known sources, mentioning Thomas Kendall by name and listing several North Island locations where the alleged informants were supposedly from, places that would have been known to Lesson from his 1824 visit to that island.

By Lesson