The Linnaean Era j 353353 353
and the Function of Their Parts. The occasion marked the opening of the Royal Garden at
its magnificent new location on the banks of the Seine, and, even at this early hour, the
mid- sized hall was packed with about 600 people from all levels of society, including 200
students from the medical school.^7 The opportunity to give the lecture had arisen when
the regular professor, Antoine de Jussieu, who was also director of the Jardin du Roi and
Vaillant’s superior, had asked Vaillant, who was seventeen years his senior and whose pri-
mary job was to maintain the herbarium and serve as “Assistant Demonstrator,” to lecture
in his place while he traveled in Spain. To the largely self- taught Vaillant, who lacked de
Jussieu’s academic credentials and family connections, it was a splendid opportunity, and he
intended to make the most of it.^8
Sebastien Vaillant’s rise in the scientific world had been improbable. The son of a trades-
man, he had shown a precocious interest in plants. But he was also a musical prodigy who,
at the age of eleven, had become organist at the Cathedral St- Maclou in Pointoise. Later,
in exchange for room and board, he became organist for a nursing order of nuns, where he
spent time watching the nuns treat patients at the local hospital. Borrowing books from the
surgeons, he immersed himself in the medical literature. After several years of observing
and studying on his own, he was accepted as an apprentice surgeon, and, by the age of nine-
teen, he was hired as an assistant surgeon in the Norman city of Evreux.^9
Around 1691 Vaillant moved to Paris, hoping to be hired as a surgeon at the Hôtel-
Dieu, the oldest hospital in Paris, but after arriving he attended a plant demonstration by
Tournefort at the Jardin du Roi and became convinced that botany was his true calling.
For the next few years, he supported himself as a surgeon in the countryside around Paris
while taking every class of Tournefort’s he could attend. Eventually, with Tournefort’s help,
he obtained the position of personal secretary to Dr. Guy- Crescent Fagon, Director of the
Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Tournefort’s death, he was appointed Assistant Demonstrator.
Despite his unorthodox background, Vaillant had managed to transform himself into a
first- rate botanist at one of the world’s great botanical gardens.
Vaillant was highly critical of Tournefort’s system of classification based on the corolla
and fruit in Institutiones Rei Herbariae, and, at the time of his opening lecture, he was pre-
paring his own magnum opus, The Botanicum Parisiense, in which he planned to introduce
a new system of plant classification based on the sexual parts of flowers— a forerunner of
the Linnaean system.
By 1717, the sexual theory of flowers was no longer novel to members of the French
Academy, who had heard two previous lectures on the same subject—the thesis defense
of Etienne- François Geoffroy in 1704, and a faculty research lecture by Claude- Joseph
Geoffroy in 1711. Both of these lectures had excited considerable interest, but the racy ver-
sion of the sexual theory Vaillant was about to present would bear little resemblance to the
dry, scientific recitations of the Geoffroy brothers. As pointed out by Jacques Rousseau,
society in early- eighteenth- century France was surprisingly puritanical and marked by an
emphasis on good manners and refinement among the higher social classes.^10 Publicly refer-
ring to sexual organs by name and expounding on their functions was simply not done in
polite company. Applying sexuality to plants, unless it was couched in the driest possible
terms, bordered on the indecent. But Vaillant had entered the Academy through the back
door and seemed to relish the role of interloper. Besides, he knew that the medical students