Jean-Baptiste Payer (1818–1860), prolific botanist and enlightened French citizen: his legacy in flower development and a need for a new, global compendium

ABSTRACT

Jean-Baptiste Payer was among the pioneer botanists who promoted ontogeny as a clue to understanding the morphological nature and affinities of floral parts. He can be rightly seen as the father of floral developmental studies. In his magnus opus, Traité d’organogénie comparée de la fleur, he compared developmental stages across 333 species from 130 families sensu APGIV to explain phenomena such as the integration of the receptacle in the flower, the nature of the perianth, congenital fusion, shifts in stamen number, and the homology of carpels. His work is breathtaking not only in its scale and beauty, but also in providing a solid scientific basis for understanding the processes involved in the differentiation of flowers. Despite being pre-Darwinian, his research demonstrates the potential for evolutionary changes in flowers, in the context of the understanding of angiosperm classification at that time. Many of Payer’s ideas are still up-to-date and his observations are of great value in contemporary studies. In addition to botany, Payer had a lightning career in politics starting from the 1848 revolution. First a rioter, he then served two terms in the Constituent Assembly, before going back to science in 1852. In poor health, he died at the age of 42. This article aims at celebrating Payer as a scientist and a politician. We highlight a need for a new, global (encompassing at least all angiosperm orders) compendium on flower development that will facilitate analyses of evolutionary transitions of ontogenetic pathways. An outline of this research program is provided.

KEYWORDS:

• Angiosperms
• diversity
• floral ontogeny
• flower
• meristem
• morphogenesis
• organogenesis

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge all the institutions which have contributed to provide scientific and science-related literature, personal, administrative and political archives. We thank the former mayor of Asfeld (France), Jacques Courtois, the town hall of Asfeld, Thierry Deroin (MNHN), Elisabeth Dodinet (President of the Société Botanique de France), Valéry Malécot (member of the SBF), and Liliane Rayer and Florence Tessier (Library of Botany, MNHN) for their precious help retrieving documents. We also thank James Byng for providing us with an APG IV tree highlighting the orders studied by Payer in his Traité. SEM studies were carried out at the Shared Research Facility “Electron microscopy in life sciences” at Moscow State University (Unique Equipment “Three-dimensional electron microscopy and spectroscopy”) in the framework of the state order of the Lomonosov Moscow State University (subsidy no. 121032500084-6). We thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments and invaluable suggestions that greatly improved our manuscript. FJ thanks Simon Lefort-Soulagnet-Bascou for his help in trying to find Jean-Baptiste Payer’s grave in the Montparnasse cemetery.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Availability of data and material

The data and material on which this article is based are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Author contributions

All co-authors conceived the outline of this manuscript, drafted the manuscript and agreed on its last version.