Charles Janet

Janet graduated from the École Centrale Paris in 1872, and worked for some years as a chemist and engineer in a few factories in Puteaux (1872), Rouen (1873–74), and Saint-Ouen (1875–76). He was then employed by Philippe Alphonse Dupont, at Société A. Dupont & Cie, a factory that produced bone buttons and fine brushes. He married Berthe Marie Antonia Dupont, the daughter of the owner, in November 1877, and worked there for the rest of his life, finding time for research in various branches of science. Janet's collection of 50,000 fossils and other specimens was dispersed after his death. His studies of the morphology of the heads of ants, wasps and bees, and his micrographs were of remarkable quality. He also worked on plant biology and wrote a series of papers on evolution. He was an inventor and designed much of his own equipment, including the formicarium, in which an ant colony is made visible by being formed between two glass panes. In 1927 he turned his attention to the periodic table and wrote a series of six articles in French that were privately printed and never widely circulated.