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His interests were united in attempts to grow trees that would provide the very best material for boat construction.His interests were many and one of his other works, L'Art de l'Épinglier (The Art of the Pin-Maker, 1761), raised the concept of the "division of labour" which is believed to have inspired Adam Smith's landmark 1776 treatise, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This work gained him membership in the prestigious Academie des Sciences and he went on to study trees, especially fruit trees, and wrote many works regarding different aspects of tree cultivation.In 1731, he was appointed as Inspector General of the French Navy, where his work on boat building and rope making maritime subjects. Born into a wealthy farming family in France, he was educated in Law at Orleans University, then studied at the Jardin des Plantes, where he discovered the fungus disease affecting the saffron crocus, an important cash crop of the era.

Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau (1700-1782) was an extraordinary individual whose diverse talents enabled him to conquer many fields of endeavour. But with the printing of maps, scholars of all nationalities could compare and revise, and this led immediately to a very considerable advance in geographical knowledge. Nor is it generally fully appreciated that up to the publication of this atlas all maps had been original manuscripts, or copies of those manuscripts, and laziness on the part of the copier, or illegibility due to use often caused inaccuracies. Today, what is not generally realised is that maps, hitherto nearly always treated as utilitarian pieces of paper, were at this time and always have been, works of art in the technique of engraving, having as they do elaborate decoration of many kinds, and magnificent calligraphy. as such this book is therefore of the first importance in the field of geography, science and all the graphic arts. Lord Wardington wrote of Ptolemy's Cosmographia, Imagine the wonderment of someone looking at a map for the first time! For these maps are the first ever printed, and for most people at that time they would have been the first maps that they had ever seen.