Palisot de Beauvois

Ambroise Marie François Joseph Palisot, Baron de Beauvois (27 July 1752, in Arras – 21 January 1820, in Paris) was a French naturalist and zoologist.

Palisot trained as a lawyer but pursued postgraduate studies in botany under Jean-Baptiste Lestiboudois in Lille and Antoine Laurent de Jussieu in Paris.

Palisot became so debilitated with yellow fever that in 1788 he was placed on a slave ship bound for Haiti where he had an uncle in Cap-français, and where he made the acquaintance of another French botanist, Guillaume Silvestre Delahaye.

He was admitted into the colonial assembly and the superior council, opposed the abolition of the slave trade, and in 1790 wrote a pamphlet in which he accused English philanthropists of sinister motives in supporting this project.

He boarded a ship bound for the United States and on the voyage was robbed of his remaining worldly goods and arrived in Philadelphia totally destitute.

He joined a circus as a musician to earn some money, and finally obtained work curating the private botanical collection of the painter Charles Willson Peale.

He joined the American Philosophical Society, contributed to its Transactions, and resumed his collecting with the sponsorship of the French minister, Pierre Adet, a scientist in his own right.

Palisot finally received word from Paris that his citizenship had been restored, and began planning his return to Europe, especially the freighting of his collections.

Griffin (1932, 1937) supplies the date of publication for each booklet which consisted of five to six plates, each depicting six or nine of the insects described in the text, and it is through these sketches, rather than by specimens, that Palisot's species are often identified.

Horn & Kahle (1937) state that some of Palisot's beetles, the Elateridae, were later sent by Pierre François Marie Auguste Dejean to Frederick DuCane Godman and Osbert Salvin at the British Museum of Natural History to be included in the Biologia Centrali-Americana.