He accompanied the explorer
Kerguelen-Trémarec on his first voyage to the
Antarctic in 1773. In 1790 he accompanied the entomologist Olivier on an expedition to Persia, but his poor health didn't allow him to continue. In 1792, although he was ill, he visited the Greek archipelago and the
Middle East, together with the
entomologistGuillaume-Antoine Olivier. He was asked by the French
Directoire to try to set up a
Franco-Persian alliance, but was unsuccessful, lacking the training of a diplomat. He died on the voyage back.
He described several taxa in his book Tableau Encyclopédique et Méthodique des trois Règnes de la Nature: vers, coquilles, mollusques et polypes divers which appeared in three volumes in 1827, long after he had died. He also wrote Histoire Naturelle des Vers. Vol. 1 (1792) but he had to stop at the letter "C".
Christian Hee Hwass continued his work and wrote most of it.
He died in
Ancona in October 1798 (and not in 1799, as mentioned in some sources; there was a discrepancy due to the
French revolutionary calendar).
He was mainly interested in
molluscs and other invertebrates, as can be seen in the following list of the taxa he named.
Authority
He named more than 140 marine genera or species, among them:
^Comptes rendus du Congrès national des sociétés savantes: Section des sciences. (1961) page 173. Jean-Guillaume Bruguière (1749-1798) et Guillaume-Antoine Olivier (1756-1814), médecins naturalistes et voyageurs. Jean Théodoridès