Jean-Jacques Rousseau is best known as one of the most important of the "philosophes" of the Age of the Enlightenment in France, but his contributions in botany were both extensive and significant. He began to study botany in the 1760’s in Switzerland and became acquainted with some of the important botanists of his era-Michel Adanson and Bernard de Jussieu, for example. Recueil de plantes coloriées (1789) was added to Lettres élémentaires sur la botanique which was published in Geneva in 1782. The colored plates were the work of Jean Aubry and are assigned to augment each of the thirty-two sections of the Lettres. Rousseau was also the creator of a number of herbaria which contained thousands of specimens collected by him and some of his acquaintances. It has been said that Rousseau’s writings did much to popularize botany and nature studies in general.