Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc

Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc (or Louis-Augustin Bosc d'Antic) (29 January 1759 – 10 July 1828) was a French botanist, invertebrate zoologist, and entomologist.

Biography Bosc was born in Paris, the son of Paul Bosc d’Antic, a medical doctor and chemist. He studied at Dijon, where he was the pupil of botanist Jean-François Durande and chemist Louis-Bernard Guyton-Morveau. Being unable to become an artilleryman, he worked initially for the office of the controller general and then for the comptroller of the postal service. In time he took courses in botany under Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and met botanist René Desfontaines and naturalist Pierre Marie Auguste Broussonet. He also took up with Jean Marie Roland and Madame Roland and formed a lasting relationship with Danish entomologist Johan Christian Fabricius. While working for the postal service he carried out work on natural history, publishing a description of a new species of bug, Orthezia characias, and a method of preserving insect larvae.

In 1785 Bosc was invited to join the Lapérouse round the world expedition as a naturalist, but declined. This was fortunate for him, as the expedition was lost after leaving Botany Bay in March 1788. Together with André Thouin, Pierre Marie Auguste Broussonet, Aubin-Louis Millin de Grandmaison and Pierre Willemet, Bosc participated, in 1787, in the founding of the first Linnean society in the world, the Société linnéenne de Paris. They were soon joined by other naturalists. This society was dissolved in 1789, in part due to hostility from the established Académie Royale des Sciences. Both Bosc and Broussonet were among the first foreign members of the Linnean Society of London. After the Storming of the Bastille in 1789, new laws in France permitted freedom of the press and assembly, allowing the formation of new societies, newspapers and journals. Among these was the Société d'Histoire Naturelle, founded in 1790 in Bosc's Home. Its journal, Actes de la société d'histoire naturelle de Paris was short-lived, but included a number of items by Bosc.. Both Bosc and the Society were politically active, with Republican leanings. Bosc was a member of the Jacobin Club.

Bosc was brought back to France, where he served for a time as administrator of hospitals and prisons and obtained, in 1803, after a sojourn in Switzerland and Italy courtesy of Georges Cuvier, a position in the gardens and nurseries of Versailles. He gave his collections to his naturalist friends. Thus, Fabricius and Guillaume-Antoine Olivier received his insects; François Marie Daudin, his birds; Pierre André Latreille, his reptiles; and the comte de Lacépède, his fish. He was also the friend and protector of naturalists Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent and Jean-Marie Léon Dufour.

In 1806, he was elected to membership in the Académie des sciences in the rural husbandry section. In 1825, he succeeded André Thouin to the chair of plant culture at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

He died unexpectedly not many years later in Paris, in 1828.

Legacy

Bosc's legacy lies mainly in the fields of agronomy and natural history. He was the author of three volumes of Suites à Buffon, edited by René Richard Louis Castel: Histoire naturelle des Coquilles (Paris, 5 volumes, 1802); Histoire naturelle des Vers (Paris, 3 volumes, 1802); and Histoire naturelle des Crustacés (Paris, 2 volumes, 1802).

Bosc participated in the editing of the Nouveau Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle appliquée aux arts, principalement à l'agriculture, à l'économie rurale et domestique, under the direction of Jean-François-Pierre Deterville and Sonnini de Manoncourt (Paris, 24 volumes, 1803–1804, re-edited in 36 volumes, 1816–1819), and the Nouveau Cours complet d'agriculture théorique et pratique, also directed by Deterville (Paris, 13 volumes, 1809, re-edited in 16 volumes, 1821–1823). Bosc also supervised the editing and republication of the agricultural classic, Théâtre d'agriculture (1600) by Olivier de Serres, published by the Société centrale d'agriculture de Paris, whose Annales he also published.

Notton (2007) provides a catogue of parasitic wasps with reference to Bosc's collection. Dolan (2020) gives a full bibliography of Bosc's publications, and a list of all the species described by him.