French botanist Achille Richard served as curator of the Benjamin Delessert Herbarium and at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris from 1817-1831. He published many successful botanical texts, in particular studying collections made in North Africa. His father was the botanist Louis Claude Marie Richard.
Richard received his Doctor of Medicine degree in Paris in 1820, by which time he had already published a successful botanical textbook, Nouveaux éléments de botanique (1819). The book went through ten editions and was translated into several languages, including Russian.
From 1817 Richard was employed as curator of the Delessert Herbarium and as an aide-demonstrateur at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle. In 1821 he was appointed aide-naturaliste at the latter and in 1823 published another well-received work, Botanique médicale (1823). Richard's first systematic monograph, meanwhile, dealt with the genus Hydrocotyle (1819). He later completed works on orchids and the family Rubiaceae.
In 1827 Richard left the Delessert Herbarium to work full time at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, where he remained until 1831, in which year he was appointed Professor of Botany in the Faculty of Medicine, Paris. He was made a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1834 and a foreign member of the Linnean Society in 1843.
Achille Richard did not himself collect plants beyond Europe, but completed a two-volume flora of Ethiopia (Tentamen Florae Abyssinicae, 1847-1851) based on material from Richard Quartin-Dillon, Anton Petit and G.H.W. Schimper. Providing descriptions of more than 1,000 species, it served as the most complete reference work for the country's flora for many years, as there was virtually no more collecting undertaken in Ethiopia until the Italian occupation in 1935-1941. He also contributed to the Florae Senegambiae Tentamen (1830-1857) of J.B.A. Guillemin and G.S. Perrottet and with R.P. Lesson authored the section on the botany of New Zealand in the accounts of the Voyage of the Astrolabe.
Sources:
Anon., 1853, Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, 53: 243-244
I. Friis and O. Ryding (eds), 2001, "Biodiversity Research in the Horn of Africa Region", Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on the Flora of Ethiopia and Eritrea: 110
F.A. Stafleu, 1970, "Benjamin Delessert and Antoine Lasègue", Taxon, 19(6): 927
W.T. Stearn, 1957, "Achille Richard's 'Mémoire sur la famille des Rubiacées'", Taxon, 6(7):186-188.
