In-4° relié demi-chagrin vert de l'époque, Membre de l'Académie des Sciences depuis 1876, professeur au Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Van Tieghem, avait traduit en français, dix ans plus tôt, le traité de botanique de l'allemand Sachs. En s'appuyant sur ses importants travaux de chercheur et d'éditeur, il propose, en 1884, son propre Traité de botanique, qu'il divise en deux parties : une botanique générale et une botanique spéciale. Celui-ci sera réédité, en deux volumes, et augmenté jusqu'en 1918. La première partie traite de la morphologie et de la physiologie de la plante et de ses différentes parties externes et internes, ainsi que de son développement ; la Botanique Spéciale consiste en une étude particulière des différentes plantes selon les espèces et les classes auxquelles elles appartiennent : Champignons, Algues, Muscinées, Cryptogrammes vasculaires et Phanérogames. Dans une dernière sous-partie, l'auteur traite de la répartition des plantes sur la terre. Philippe Édouard Léon Van Tieghem (19 April 1839 - 28 April 1914) was a French botanist born in Baillleul in the département of Nord. He was one of the best known French botanists of the latter nineteenth century. Van Tieghem's father was a textile merchant who died of yellow fever in Martinique before he was born, and his mother shortly thereafter. One of five children, he obtained his baccalauréat in 1856, and continued his studies at the École Normale Supérieure, where after receiving agrégation, he worked in the laboratory of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). Here he performed research involving the cultivation of mushrooms. He is credited with creation of the eponymous "Van Tieghem cell", a device mounted on a microscope slide that allows for observing the development of a fungus' mycelium. In 1864 he earned his doctorate in physical sciences with a thesis titled Recherches sur la fermentation de l'urée et de l'acide hippurique, and two years later obtained a doctorate in natural history. From 1873 to 1886, he taught classes at the École centrale des arts et manufactures, and from 1878 to 1914, was a professor at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle. Within this time period (1899-1914), he was also an instructor at the Institut agronomique in Paris. In 1871 he became a member of the Société philomathique de Paris, and in 1876 gained membership to the Académie des sciences. In 1874 he translated the third edition of Julius von Sachs' Lehrbuch der Botanik textbook (1873) from German into French as Traité de botanique conforme à l'état présent de la science. Van Tieghem's own Traité de botanique appeared in 1884, in which he outlined his schema for taxonomic classification. In 1876 he was the first to describe blastomycosis, a fungal infection that is also known as "Gilchrist disease", named after Thomas Casper Gilchrist (1862-1927), who published a treatise on the condition in 1896. He died in Paris in 1914.
