Père Jean Marie Delavay

While in France in 1881, on a break from his duties, Delavay met the natural history collector and fellow missionary Père Armand David, who had made his final collecting expedition in China in the 1870s.

David encouraged Delavay to continue his collecting work and send specimens to the Paris Museum of Natural History.

By 1891 it was clear that a more drastic cure was needed, so Delavay returned to France in hopes of gaining a full recovery.

Unable to stay away, he returned to China in 1893 and continued his collections, adding another 1550 plants to his already impressive total, but in 1895 he finally succumbed to his illness, and died in Yunnan province aged 61.

[3] Delavay was an avid plant collector, sending over 200,000 herbarium specimens back to France, from which numerous new genera and over 1,500 new species were described, many by Adrien René Franchet of the Paris Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle.