Les enjeux et les pratiques de l’éponymie dans l’histoire de la nomenclature zoologique et botanique au XVIII^e siècle

The practice of naming an organism after a real person (eponymy) has been known since Greek antiquity, but remained rare until the end of the seventeenth century. Around 1700, eponymy underwent a rapid and spectacular expansion, notably under the impetus of a French botanist and traveller, Charles Plumier, who named many plant genera in this way. Eponymy developed over the following decades, but initially remained confined to botany. It moved into zoology, but only at the level of specific names, from the 1750s onward, when the new Linnaean system of nomenclature was introduced. It then became a common way of creating scientific zoonyms, up to the present day. This study describes the development of eponymy in relation to the general history of naturalists’ nomenclature in the eighteenth century. It analyses its distribution, how names were coined, and the way it was exploited by naturalists, particularly through their choice of eponyms. It reveals the existence of both scientific and extra-scientific strategies and the constitution of “eponymic networks” that complicate the link between names and the organisms they designate, and it highlights the specificity of the case of animals compared with plants.