A member, and later president, of the Academie des Sciences, French botanist and doctor Rene Louiche Desfontaines (1750 1833) spent the years 1783 5 on an expedition to North Africa. During his time in Tunisia and Algeria, he collected over a thousand plant specimens: more than three hundred genera were new to European naturalists at this time. Having succeeded Le Monnier in the chair of botany at the Jardin du Roi in 1786, Desfontaines helped found the Institut de France following the Revolution and published his two-volume Flora atlantica in Latin in 1798 9. A lavishly illustrated second...