Adolphe d'Archiac

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Adolphe d'Archiac

Adolphe d'Archiac , full name Étienne Jules Adolphe Desmier de Saint-Simon, Viscount d'Archiac , (born September 24, 1802 in Reims , † December 24, 1868 in Paris ) was a French geologist and paleontologist . He pioneered the geological exploration of Europe and described numerous fossils . Its botanical author abbreviation is " D'Archiac ".

Life

Born in Reims , he was educated at the Saint-Cyr Military School and served as a cavalry officer for nine years . While he was active as a writer, his field of interest was not science: in 1828 he published a three-volume historical romance in which the Muslim prince Zizim conquered the Byzantine Empire , and in 1930 a study of the development of literature and customs since the fall Napoleons . After the end of the July Revolution of 1830, he resigned and turned to geology and paleontology. After three decades of geological research, which earned him approval from the greats of French geology such as Alexandre Brongniart , Armand Dufrénoy and Léonce Élie de Beaumont , d'Archiac was appointed professor of palaeontology at the Muséum national d 'in 1861 as the successor to Alcide Dessalines d'Orbigny appointed histoire naturelle .

Against the suspected background of an existing depression , he committed suicide on Christmas Eve 1868 by throwing himself into the Seine and drowning.

Act

D'Archiac's early research in the mid-1830s focused on the Tertiary and Cretaceous of France, Belgium, and England , specifically on the distribution and sequence of fossils . As part of this work, he formulated some fundamental laws about the occurrence of fossils in geological tradition, especially in the work On the Fossils of the older Deposits in the Rhenish Provinces on the Rhenish Slate Mountains, which he wrote together with Édouard de Verneuil . He later extended his work to the Carboniferous , Devonian, and Silurian . In 1847 he published the first volume of his extensive work Histoire des progrès de la géologie de 1834 à 1859 , which appeared in volumes between 1847 and 1860. In 1867 he published together with Jules Haime (1824-1856) a monograph on the Nummulite Formation of India . Of his publications in the 1860s, the Paléontologie stratigraphique in three volumes (1864 and 1865), the textbook Géologie et paleontologie from 1866 and his palaeontological contributions to Pyotr Alexandrovich Tschichachev's Asie mineure from the same year should be mentioned as representative.

Honors

In 1844, 1849 and 1854 d'Archiac was chairman of the Société géologique de France . In 1857 he received the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London and was elected to the Académie des Sciences in the same year . In 1861 he received the Officer's Cross of the Legion of Honor .

literature

Web links

Commons : Adolphe d'Archiac  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Adolphe d'Archiac  - Sources and full texts (French)

References and comments

  1. ^ A b Thomas Henry Huxley : Anniversary Address of the President 1870. Scientific Memoirs . In: The Geological Society (Ed.): Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society . tape 26 , part 1, February 1870, p. xxix-lxiv ( aleph0.clarku.edu or Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  2. ↑ a b c d Adolphe d'Archiac - Histoire des progrès de la géologie. Agence régionale de l'environnement de Haute-Normandie, archived from the original on December 4, 2008 ; accessed on July 21, 2019 (French).
  3. ↑ In his time the Silurian also included the Ordovician .
  4. ↑ In memoriam. Les Membres de l'Académie des sciences depuis sa création (en 1666). Académie des sciences, archived from the original on August 10, 2011 ; accessed on July 21, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Archiac, Adolphe d '
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Archiac, Étienne Jules Adolphe Desmier de Saint-Simon Viscount d '
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French geologist and paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 24, 1802
PLACE OF BIRTH Reims
DATE OF DEATH December 24, 1868
Place of death Paris