plants till then mostly unknown in Europe,
which he afterwards described in _Plantes equinoxiales_, &c. (Paris,
1808-1816). On returning to Paris he received a pension and the
superintendence of the gardens at Malmaison, and published _Monographie
des Melastomees_ (1806), and _Description des plantes rares de Navarre_
(1813). In 1816 he set out, taking with him various European plants, for
Buenos Aires, where he was elected professor of natural history, an
office which he soon quitted in order to explore central South America.
While journeying to Bolivia he was arrested in 1821, by command of Dr
Francia, the dictator of Paraguay, who detained him until 1831. On
regaining liberty he resided at San Borga in the province of Corrientes,
until his removal in 1853 to Santa Anna, where he died on the 4th of May
1858.

BONSTETTEN, CHARLES VICTOR DE (1745-1832), Swiss writer, an excellent
type of a liberal patrician, more French than Swiss, and a good
representative of the Gallicized Bern of the 18th century. By birth a
member of one of the great patrician families of Bern, he was educated
in his native town, at Yverdon, and (1763-1766) at Geneva, where he came
under the influence of Rousseau and of Charles Bonnet, and imbibed
liberal sentiments. Recalled to Bern by his father, he was soon sent to
Leiden, and then visited (1769) England, where he became a friend of the
poet Gray. After his father's death (1770) he made a long journey in
Italy, and on his return to Bern (1774) entered political life, for
which he was unfitted by reason of his liberal ideas, which led him to
patronize and encourage Johannes Muller, the future Swiss historian. In
1779 he was named the Bernese bailiff of Saanen or Gessenay (here he
wrote his _Lettres pastorales sur une contree de la Suisse_, published
in German in 1781), and in 1787 was transferred in a similar capacity to
Nyon, from which post he had to retire after taking part (1791) in a
festival to celebrate the destruction of the Bastille. From 1795 to 1797
he governed (for the Swiss Confederation) the Italian-speaking districts
of Lugano, Locarno, Mendrisio and Val Maggia, of which he published
(1797) a pleasing description, and into which he is said to have
introduced the cultivation of the potato. The French revolution of 1798
in Switzerland drove him again into private life. He spent the years
1798 to 1801 in Denmark, with his friend Fredirika Brun, and then
settled down in 1803 in Ge