French naturalist who studied Canarian flora. Together with Webb he published "Histoire Naturelle des Îles Canaries", a fundamental work of Canarian botany.
Sabin Berthelot was born in Dunkirk, France, in 1794 and arrived in the Canary Islands in 1820, where he would spend most of his adult life. He was French consul in Tenerife for decades and used that position to devote himself with passion to the scientific exploration of the archipelago. He learned Spanish and integrated fully into Canarian society, to the point of being considered an adopted Canarian.
His monumental work, Histoire Naturelle des Îles Canaries (1836-1850), written together with the English botanist Philip Barker Webb, is the most comprehensive encyclopaedia ever produced on the archipelago. The work covered botany, zoology, geology, geography, ethnography and linguistics, and was illustrated with magnificent scientific plates. For botany, it represented the definitive inventory of nineteenth-century Canarian flora. Berthelot also wrote about the Guanches, their customs and their language, being one of the first researchers to systematically address the pre-Hispanic history of the islands.
Berthelot died in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1880, aged eighty-six, having devoted sixty of those years to the Canary Islands. He was buried in the cemetery of Santa Lastenia, in La Laguna. His name appears in the scientific nomenclature of several species of Canarian fauna and flora. The Municipal Library of Santa Cruz de Tenerife preserves part of his personal archive, and his figure is today recognised as one of the great foreign contributors to scientific knowledge of the archipelago.