Count Alexandre Henri Gabriel de Cassini
(May 9, 1781 – April 16, 1832) was a French botanist
, who specialised in the sunflower family (Asteraceae
) (then known as family Compositae).
He was the youngest of five children of Jacques Dominique, Comte de Cassini
, who had succeeded his father as the director of the Paris Observatory
, famous for completing the map of France. He was also the great-great-grandson of famous Italian-French astronomer
, Giovanni Domenico Cassini
, discoverer of Jupiter
's Great Red Spot and the Cassini division
The genus Cassinia
was named in his honour by the botanist Robert Brown
He named many flowering plants
and new genera in the sunflower family (Asteraceae), many of them from North America. He published 65 papers and 11 reviews in the Bulletin des Sciences par la Société Philomatique de Paris
between 1812 and 1821.
In 1825, Cassini placed the North American taxa of Prenanthes
in the new genus Nabalus
, now considered a subgenus of Prenanthes (family Asteraceae, tribe Lactuceae).
In 1828 he named Dugaldia hoopesii
for the Scottish naturalist Dugald Stewart (1753-1828).
Some genera (originally) named by him :