He also collected specimens of every object of commerce, delineated maps of the country, made systematic meteorological and astronomical observations, and prepared grammars and dictionaries of the languages spoken on the banks of the Sénégal.

[2] Sales of the work were slow, and after the publisher's bankruptcy and the reimbursement to subscribers, Adanson estimated the cost of the book to him had been 5,000 livres, beginning the penury in which he lived the rest of his life.

[3]: 49  This work has a special interest from the essay on shells, printed at the end of it, where Adanson proposed his universal method, a system of classification distinct from those of Buffon and Linnaeus.

In this work he developed the principle of arrangement above mentioned, which, in its adherence to natural botanical relations, was based on the system of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, and had been anticipated to some extent nearly a century before by John Ray.

The success of this work was hindered by its innovations in the use of terms, which were ridiculed by the defenders of the popular sexual system of Linnaeus; but it did much to open the way for the establishment, by means principally of Antoine Laurent de Jussieu's Genera Plantarum (1789), of the natural method of the classification of plants.

Adanson not only described evolution in his "Familles de plantes", published in 1763 when Lamarck was a young man of twenty, but also suggested that the changes in specific characteristics were produced through the inheritance of acquired characters.

"[4] In an article for the Histoire and Memoires de l'Academie Royale des Sciences of 1769, Adanson used the term "mutations" to refer to small changes that could bring about new variations in individuals.

[2] He died in Paris after months of severe suffering, requesting, as the only decoration of his grave, a garland of flowers gathered from the fifty-eight families he had differentiated – "a touching though transitory image," says Georges Cuvier, "of the more durable monument which he has erected to himself in his works."

[2] His papers and herbarium remained in his family's hands for over a century and a half, finally coming to the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in 1961–62.

When he was little more than a youth he went to Senegal, stayed there five or six years, observing, collecting, dissecting, describing and classifying; and he summarised all this in a brief but eminently respectable natural history of the country, from which I learnt almost everything I know of the African flora and fauna.