Type: | Apostolic vicar |
Honorific Prefix: | His Excellency, The Most Reverend |
Félix-Marie Biet | |
Honorific Suffix: | MEP |
Church: | Catholic Church |
Diocese: | Apostolic Vicariate of Tibet |
Enthroned: | 27 August 1878 |
Term End: | 9 September 1901 |
Other Post: | Titular Bishop of Diana |
Birth Date: | 21 October 1838 |
Birth Place: | Langres, Haute-Marne, France |
Death Place: | Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d'Or, Lyon Metropolis, France |
Occupation: | Priest, missionary, entomologist, ornithologist |
Motto: | Latin: Suaviter et fortiter |
Coat Of Arms: | Coat of arms of Félix Biet and Pierre-Philippe Giraudeau.jpg |
Félix Biet, MEP (1838 in Langres, Haute-Marne – 1901 in Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d'Or) was a French Catholic prelate who served as the Apostolic Vicar of Tibet from 1878 to 1901. He was a member of the Paris Foreign Missions Society and also a naturalist.
Biet was born in 1838. He was ordained as a priest in 1864. He was next sent to Tatsienlu in Tibet (called Dartsedo by Tibetans) as a missionary and he became the Bishop of the Apostolic Vicariate of Thibet, now Diocese of Kangding, in 1898. Félix Biet collected butterflies for Charles Oberthür who dedicated three new species (Thecla bieti, Pantoporia bieti and Anthocharis bieti) to him. Alphonse Milne-Edwards described the Chinese mountain cat (Felis bieti) and the black snub-nosed monkey, (Rhinopithecus bieti), the latter collected and sent by Jean-André Soulié. The Biet's laughingthrush a Chinese endemic species was another discovery, named by Émile Oustalet in 1897. Those natural history collections from Tibet and China are in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
He was succeeded by Pierre-Philippe Giraudeau.