Robert de Lamanon

Robert left holy orders and together they set out on a trip round Europe and the French provinces collecting plants, documents, manuscripts and objets d'art.

They perfected their studies in Paris and there met the most famous scholars of the era : Laplace, Jussieu, d'Alembert, the Monge brothers, Volney, Malesherbes, and Condorcet, secretary of the Académie des sciences.

Robert's paper on fossils found in the gypsum formation around Paris, Observations sur la Physique, contributed to practice of turning physical geography into geohistory.

The practice was still novel at the time, Nicolas Desmarest (1725-1815) publishing his essay on recognizing prismatic basalt as old lava streams only three years before[1] in 1774.

Reported to be "energetic and full of lively curiosity," on a trip from Paris to England, Robert ordered himself to be tied to the mainmast during a violent storm so that he could contemplate the spectacle.