Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton was born three hundred years ago today in Montbard, where his statue looks down over the city from the park named for his cousin and colleague Buffon.
Daubenton’s accomplishments in natural history were considerable, his bibliography vast. Co-author of the first volumes of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, he was also the first director of the new National Museum, and Cuvier himself gratefully acknowledged Daubenton’s work in laying the foundations of comparative anatomy.
But today, more than two centuries after his death in 1799, Daubenton is best remembered for one thing: his connection to the merino sheep.
Alongside his other duties, Daubenton spent the better part of three decades breeding merino rams with French ewes, hoping to produce a cross as hardy as the latter but with the fine, soft wool of the former. This was not a purely academic exercise. As Lacépède put it in Year X of the first Republic, with a nervous glance at England,
success would result in lifting the heavy yoke of foreign competition under which our own industries labor.
Similar political, scientific, and commercial interests led to the sheep crazes of the early nineteenth century. For a brief time in the United States, merino rams were fetching more than a thousand dollars at auction, and there was widespread fear that the country’s entire wool manufactory would collapse under the strain.
By then, though, Daubenton was at rest in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, leaving to future generations of scientists and natural historians a shining example of those qualities we all could use more of:
concentration, reflection, perseverance, the wise use of our time, and the unstinting application of our energies.
