Alexandre Brongniart

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Alexandre Brongniart

Alexandre Brongniart (born February 10, 1770 in Paris , † October 7, 1847 there ) was a French chemist , mineralogist , geologist and zoologist . Its official botanical author abbreviation is “ Al.Brongn. ".

Life

Alexandre Brongniart was the son of the architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart (1739-1813), who designed the palace of the stock exchange , and the father of the botanist Adolphe Théodore Brongniart (1801-1876).

He married Jeanne Cécile de Coquebert Montbret (1782–1862), the daughter of the statesman and scientist Charles-Etienne de Coquebert Montbret (1755–1831) and had three children, a son and two daughters. The son was the botanist and paleobotanist Adolphe Théodore Brongniart . His daughter Hermine Brongniart (1803–1890) married the chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas (1800–1884) and the youngest daughter Mathilde Brongniart (1808–1882) married Jean Victor Audouin (1797–1841).

Alexandre Brongniart's uncle was Antoine-Louis Brongniart (1742-1804), a chemist at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle . Alexandre Brongniart became interested in the natural sciences at an early age and supported his uncle at the Jardin des Plantes for a while. In 1788 he took part in the founding of the Société philomatique de Paris. This scientific and philosophical, multidisciplinary society has the motto "learning and friendship".

He studied at the École des Mines and later at the École de Médecine . After working as aide-pharmacien in the French military in the Pyrenees, Brongniart returned to Paris. In 1794 he was appointed ingénieur des mines , and in 1797 professor of natural history at the École Centrale des Quatre-Nations . Then in 1818 he became engineer en chef des mines , and in 1822 he succeeded in replacing René-Just Haüy (1743–1822) as professor and director of the chair of mineralogy at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle . In 1819 Brongniart was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society and in 1824 of the Leopoldina Scholars Academy . Since 1827 he was a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and since 1837 a foreign member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . He taught at the Paris École des Mines .

In 1800, after the publication of his work Mémoire sur l'art de l'enameller Brongniart was by Claude Berthollet director of the porcelain manufactory appointed by Sèvres. He held this position until his death in 1847. As director of the porcelain factory of Sèvres, he renewed and improved the stained glass industry . In 1824 he founded the French National Museum of Ceramics (Le musée national de Céramique). He then published, in collaboration with Denis Désiré Riocreux (1791–1872), the museum's exhibition: “Description méthodique du musée céramique de la Manufacture royale de porcelaine de Sèvres”.

Brongniart was elected a member of the Académie des sciences in 1815 ; since 1807 he was a corresponding member. In 1823 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1825 a foreign member of the Royal Society of London .

Burial site in the Paris cemetery, Cimetière du Père-Lachaise

He was buried in the Le Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, 11th district.

Scientific achievements

His other oeuvre included works on mineralogy , the art of ceramic manufacture and a new (now outdated) classification of reptiles into four groups. His studies of trilobites and his contributions to stratigraphy were important for paleontology because he used guide fossils to distinguish geological layers from one another.

In 1813 he described a volcanic rock called trachyte .

Zoological

Brongniart wrote in his earliest scientific papers - the first was published in 1791 - on various zoological and mineralogical-geological topics.

He was strongly influenced by Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), a contemporary. In his Essai d'une classification naturelle des reptiles (1800), for example, he emphasized the primary importance of a carefully performed comparative anatomy. On this basis he divided the class of Reptilia into the four groups lizards , amphibians , turtles and snakes . He realized, however, that the group of amphibians differed markedly from all others, especially in the reproductive organs, and that this distinction was much more important than the rest of the differences. In 1804, Pierre André Latreille (1762–1833) placed amphibians in a separate class, the amphibians . Brongniart's grouping of real reptiles essentially corresponds to the modern system.

He wrote the first systematic study of the trilobites , an extinct class of arthropods . These became important for determining the chronology of the individual Paleozoic strata (here from 540 to 245 million years ago).

Mineralogical-geological

In 1807 Brongniart wrote the treatise Traité élémentaire de minéralogie , which quickly became a classic in this field. Brongniart studied together with Georges Cuvier the geology of the Paris basin and in 1812 wrote the scientific paper Description géologique des environs de Paris . He also published on the geology of the Swiss Jura . He was the first scientist who arranged and described the geological formations of the tertiary period (from 66.4 to 1.6 million years ago) in chronological order. Brongniart is also considered to be the first to describe the minerals nakrit (1807), glauberite (1808), bustamite (1826) and dufrénite (1833).

Alexandre Brongniart's name can be associated with the term Ophiolite (Greek ophis for 'snake'). He used this term in 1813 to describe a rock that is reminiscent of snakeskin and ophicalcite . The rock has now been renamed serpentinite . He also gave a rock the name Variolit, which is reminiscent of the small, white pustules of smallpox. With Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest , he published L'histoire naturelle des crustacés fossiles in 1832 and his main work Traité des arts céramiques ou des Poteries in 1844 , which summarizes all the research of his life.

Works

  • Lefebvre; Silvestre; Brongniart; Alexandre: Considérations sur les avantages que le gouvernement pourrait assurer tant au commerce qu'aux diverse parties du service public par l'exploitation de quelques mines dont la République se trouve en possession 1797–1798
  • Brongniart, Alexandre: Essai d'une classification naturelle des reptiles . in Bulletin de la Société Philomathique, 2 (1800), 81-82, 89-91
  • Brongniart, Alexandre; Cuvier, Georges: Essai sur la geographie minéralogique des environs de Paris , Journal des mines, 23, no. 138 (Juin 1808), 421–458
  • Brongniart, Alexandre: Tableau des terrains qui composent l'écorce du globe ou Essai sur la structure de la partie connue de la terre , FG Levrault (Paris), 1829
  • Brongniart, Alexandre: Traité des arts céramiques ou Des poteries considérées dans leur histoire, leur pratique et leur théorie , Paris, Béchet jeune, A. Mathias, 1844, XXVIII-592, 706, 80 p., 3 tomes
  • Brongniart, Alexandre; Riocreux, Denis-Désiré: Description méthodique du musée céramique de la Manufacture royale de porcelaine de Sèvres , Paris, A. Leleux, 1845

literature

Web links

Commons : Alexandre Brongniart  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Alexandre Brongniart  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. Brongniart, Alexandre (1770–1847) et ses descendants ( French ) correspondancefamiliale.ehess.fr. Retrieved October 19, 2011.
  2. ^ Website of the Société philomatique de Paris
  3. ^ Member History: Alexandre Brongniart. American Philosophical Society, accessed May 21, 2018 .
  4. ^ Members of the previous academies. Alexandre Brongniart. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , accessed on March 2, 2015 .
  5. Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 50.
  6. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed October 12, 2019 .
  7. ^ Entry on Brongniart; Alexandre (1770-1847) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
  8. Histoire naturelle des crustacés fossils sous les rapports zoologiques et géologiques: savoir les trilobites. FG Levrault, Paris (1822).
  9. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. (2009) Encyclopædia Britannica Online. January 28, 2009 .