Abstract
THIS distinguished Belgian zoologist was born on December 19, 1809, at Malines, in the province of Antwerp, a town once well known for its extensive manufacture of lace. He received an excellent education, and early showed a decided taste for natural history; his native town being built on the borders of a tidal river, his attention was soon called to the examination of the littoral fauna of Belgium, though it will be remembered that Belgium only evolved itself into a kingdom in the year 1830, when Beneden came of age. His first promotion was to the keepership of the Natural History Collections at Louvain, and in 1835 he was made an assistant professor in the University of Gand, a post which he appears to have held for only one Term, as we find him in the same year professor of the Catholic University at Louvain, which professorship he continued to fill for more than half a century. Van Beneden belonged to a generation of zoologists that connected Cuvier with the present age, and followed so far in this great master's steps, that they worked at almost all the branches of the animal kingdom. If we were to give a summary of the very extensive writings of van Beneden we should begin with his memoirs on apes, seals, whales, and so through the various classes, with perhaps the exception of the birds and reptiles, to the gregarines. Circumstances made him devote a great deal of attention to the groups of parasitic worms and Annelides. Most of his papers on these forms were communicated to the Brussels Academy of Sciences or to the Paris Academy; the latter we find reported on by Quatrefages. He took a leading part in the, at one time, exciting controversy about the “alternation of generations,” with the elder Sars, D'Udekem, and others.
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Pierre Joseph Van Beneden. Nature 49, 293–294 (1894). https://doi.org/10.1038/049293c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/049293c0