Jules Bourgeois
Encyclopedia
Jules Bourgeoiswas a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 entomologist who specialised in Coleoptera.

Jules Bourgeois was initially associated with his father and brother in Rouen
Rouen
Rouen , in northern France on the River Seine, is the capital of the Haute-Normandie region and the historic capital city of Normandy. Once one of the largest and most prosperous cities of medieval Europe , it was the seat of the Exchequer of Normandy in the Middle Ages...

 , as the Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

  representative of the family weaving business(1881-1889) and he finally representing the spinning mills of H. Schwartz in Sainte Marie-aux-Mines from 1893. He used his leisure time to follow his true vocation, that of naturalist. An entomologist of international fame, J.B. studied especially the exotic coleoptera in the then group Malacodermata, now unranked (Elateroidea
Elateroidea
Elateroidea is a large superfamily of beetles. It contains the familiar click beetles, fireflies, and soldier beetles, and their relatives.Certain clusters of families within the superfamily are more strongly related to one another; for example, the Elateridae has close ties to Anischiidae,...

 (in part), Lymexyloidea, Cleroidea
Cleroidea
Cleroidea is a small superfamily of beetles. Most of the members of the group are somewhat slender, often with fairly soft, flexible elytra, and typically hairy or scaly.It contains about 10,000 species in the families:* Acanthocnemidae Crowson 1964...

, Tenebrionoidea
Tenebrionoidea
Tenebrionoidea is a very large and diverse superfamily of beetles.It broadly corresponds to the 'Heteromera' of earlier authors.It contains the families:* Aderidae Winkler 1927 * Anthicidae Latreille 1819...

). He described several hundreds of new species in many scientific publications and especially in the Bulletin and Annales of the Société entomologique de France of which he was a very active member. Jules Bourgeois is especially known to Alsatian
Alsace
Alsace is the fifth-smallest of the 27 regions of France in land area , and the smallest in metropolitan France. It is also the seventh-most densely populated region in France and third most densely populated region in metropolitan France, with ca. 220 inhabitants per km²...

 entomologists by his catalogue of the beetles of "la chaîne des Vosges
Vosges
Vosges is a French department, named after the local mountain range. It contains the hometown of Joan of Arc, Domrémy.-History:The Vosges department is one of the original 83 departments of France, created on February 9, 1790 during the French Revolution. It was made of territories that had been...

" and surrounding regions published in part in 1898 in the Bulletin de la Société d’histoire naturelle de Colmar
Colmar
Colmar is a commune in the Haut-Rhin department in Alsace in north-eastern France.It is the capital of the department. Colmar is also the seat of the highest jurisdiction in Alsace, the appellate court....

. One finds there more than 3000 species indexed with very many localities. The author thus showed the great richness of the entomological fauna of the Alsace,the richest of France, after the Provence
Provence
Provence ; Provençal: Provença in classical norm or Prouvènço in Mistralian norm) is a region of south eastern France on the Mediterranean adjacent to Italy. It is part of the administrative région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur...

 and Côte d'Azur. With the death of Jules, the work, of 800 pages, was completed by Paul Scherdlin, conservator of the Musée zoologique de l'ULP et de la ville de Strasbourg, Strasbourg
Strasbourg
Strasbourg is the capital and principal city of the Alsace region in eastern France and is the official seat of the European Parliament. Located close to the border with Germany, it is the capital of the Bas-Rhin département. The city and the region of Alsace are historically German-speaking,...

. In 1885, Jules Bourgeois had a rich collection of more than 15,000 species of Palearctic
Palearctic
The Palearctic or Palaearctic is one of the eight ecozones dividing the Earth's surface.Physically, the Palearctic is the largest ecozone...

 Coleoptera without counting all the exotic species. Because of the annexation of Alsace in 1870, this collection, like many others, was transferred to Paris. It is currently in the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle
Muséum national d'histoire naturelle
The Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle is the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France.- History :The museum was formally founded on 10 June 1793, during the French Revolution...

. Jules Bourgeois was a member of the Société naturelle de Colmar, chair of the Société entomologique de France in 1883,and prize winner of the Dollfus price in 1894 allotted by the same society.His ore and mineral collection of the Rouen valley is one of the treasures of the museum of natural history of his native area. In parallel, he was devoted to local history and collaborated actively in the Revue d’Alsace, Review of Alsace. Président de la Société industrielle de Sainte Marie-aux-Mines. Officier d’académie.

Source

Jean Lhoste (1987). Les Entomologistes français. 1750-1950. INRA Éditions : 351 p.
  • Translation from French Wikipedia
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK