#MB80
1834
Folio (ca. 32x21 cm). 1 p. Brown ink on watermarked wove paper with letterhead of the “Société de Géographie, Commission Centrale”. Legible text in French. Centrefold mark, otherwise a very good letter.
In his letter to the current minister of French navy and colonies, Admiral Louis Leon Jacob (1768-1854), the author, French cartographer and archaeologist Edme Francois Jomard informs about the recent publication of the French Geographical Society: Francois Leprieur’s report of his voyage in the interior of French Guiana in the early 1830s. Jomard notes that the report has been approved on the session of the Geographical Society on the 17th of October [1834], and in conformity with the Admiral's wishes, Jomard is sending him a copy of it. The publication he is talking about is most likely an offprint of Leprieur’s article “Voyage dans la Guyane centrale” (Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Paris, 2e série, I, 1834, p. 201-229).
“François Mathias René Leprieur (1799-1870) was a French pharmacist and naturalist. While being stationed in Senegambia in 1824-1829 he extensively travelled in the region; the results of his observations were published as "Florae Senegambiae tentamen" (1830-1833) by Perrottet, Guillemin and Richard. In 1830-1849 he was based in Cayenne, Guyane, where he attained the post of pharmacist first-class. He travelled along the Oyapock River to its source and collected a large amount of natural history specimens. From 1850 to 1858, he was assigned to the island of Martinique. Plants with the specific epithet of leprieurii are named in his honor, an example being Zanthoxylum leprieurii” (Wikipedia).
