The New International Encyclopædia/Flourens, Marie Jean Pierre

FLOURENS, Marie Jean Pierre (1794-1867). A celebrated French experimental physiologist and author, born at Maureilhan, Hérault. After having obtained his degree of doctor of medicine at Montpellier, at the age of nineteen, he proceeded to Paris. He was assistant to Cuvier in 1828-30, and in 1832 he succeeded him as professor of natural history in the Jardin du Roi. In 1833 he succeeded Dulong as perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences, in 1835 he became professor in the Collège de France, and in 1840 the French Academy elected him a member. He was made a peer of France by Louis Philippe in 1846. He died at Montgeron, near Paris. For more than forty years Flourens was a voluminous writer on human and comparative anatomy and physiology, on natural history, and on various special departments of the history of the natural and physical sciences. Among his most important works are Recherches expérimentales sur les propriétés et les fonctions du système nerveux dans les animaux vertébrés (1824), with a supplementary volume, entitled Expériences sur le système nerveux (1825); Recherches sur le développement des os et des dents (1845); Anatomie générale de la peau et des membranes muqueuses (1843), and his Théorie expérimentale de la formation des os (1847), perhaps the most celebrated of his works. Among his smaller and popular works are his De l'instinct et de l'intelligence des animaux (1841); Histoire de la découverte de la circulation du sang (1854); De la longevité humaine, et de la quantité de vie sur le globe (1854); and Eloges historiques (3 vols., 1856-62).