Jacques Labillardière

Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière (28 October 1755 – 8 January 1834) was a French biologist noted for his descriptions of the flora of Australia.

Having decided to pursue his interest in natural history, rather than a medical career, he took up an opportunity to collect specimens for Louis-Guillaume Le Monnier.

Sent to Britain by Le Monnier to study the exotic plants in cultivation there, he ended up staying almost two years, during which time he established enduring friendships with Sir Joseph Banks, James Edward Smith, Aylmer Bourke Lambert and George Williams.

D'Entrecasteaux failed to find any trace of the missing expedition, but his ships visited south-west Australia, Tasmania, the North Island of New Zealand, and the East Indies, where Labillardière, Claude Riche and Étienne Pierre Ventenat, assisted by gardener Félix Delahaye, collected zoological, botanical and geological specimens, and described the customs and languages of the local Indigenous Australians.

In 1796, Banks's lobbying succeeded, and he was able to write to William Price at the British Museum: ... his Majesty's Ministers have thought it necessary for the honour of the British nation and for the advancement of Science that the right of the Captors to the Collection should be on this occasion wav'd and that the whole should be returned to M. de Billardiere, in order that he may be able to publish his Observations on Natural History in a complete manner ... By this her Majesty will lose an acquisition to her herbarium, which I very much wish'd to see deposited there, but the national character of Great Britain will certainly gain much credit for holding a conduct towards Science and Scientific men liberal in the highest degree.Labillardière returned to France with his collections in 1796.

Augustin Saint-Hilaire, for example, wrote that Labillardière "could perceive someone's slightest defect; yet he would have been ready to open his purse for the same man whose ridiculousness had not escaped him, and would have done all in his power to help him".

[14] It has been said that Labillardière was scrupulously honest, especially with money,[15] yet he has also been criticised for failing to acknowledge the work of others, such as his unattributed use of specimens collected by L'Héritier.

[citation needed] Nothing is known of his physique, but his travels as a naturalist reveal him to be a man of good physical fitness, with a strong constitution and immense stamina.

Intellectually, he is shown to be not just an outstanding botanist and naturalist with excellent observational skills, but also to be possessed of considerable linguistic abilities,[16] including an impeccable grasp of Latin.

In 1978, the Irish botanist Ernest Charles Nelson published Adenanthos labillardierei with the specific epithet: "in recognition of Labillardière's contribution to the knowledge of this genus, and Australian botany".

The former appear to be at least partly attributable to mistakes made in converting the measurements and dates in his journal into the metric system and the Republican Calendar respectively.

His reputation has since been restored somewhat by the Carrs who, in 1976, published a detailed validation of his account of his visit to Observatory Island, where Eucalyptus cornuta (Yate) was first collected.

[24] Labillardière's type location for Eucalyptus cordata remained unverified for nearly 200 years until, in August 1987, Bradley Potts, from the Department of Botany at the University of Tasmania, and Gintaras Kantvilas, from the Tasmanian Herbarium, rediscovered a stand of 200 trees on steep and densely forested Penguin Island.

[26] Edward Duyker suggested that, given the period the specimens were in foreign hands, "the errors made in the published habitat statements for about a dozen species may have been a result of a shuffling of herbarium sheets or notes without Labillardière’s knowledge".

That is largely due to the paucity of documents and testimonies: fewer than sixty of his letters survive, and many of them are purely related to business matters.