Amanz Gressly

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Amanz Gressly in the 1860s

Amanz Gressly (born July 17, 1814 in Bärschwil , † April 13, 1865 in Bern ) was a Swiss geologist and paleontologist. The use of the term facies in geology goes back to Gressly , he is considered to be one of the founders of modern stratigraphy and paleoecology .

Life

Amanz Gressly was born in Bärschwil as the son of Xaver Franz Gressly and Margrit, nee. von Glutz-Ruchti , born the first of eight siblings. The Gresslys were considered a wealthy family; however, his parents' glassworks in Bärschwil went bankrupt in the 1850s . Since then Amanz Gressly has always tried to support his impoverished father, although he himself often found himself in financial difficulties.

Gressly began studying medicine in Strasbourg in 1834 , but soon broke it off and devoted himself entirely to his passion, geology . This was largely self-taught . During this time Gressly began collecting fossils , an activity that he pursued intensively throughout his life. As a child he and his comrades had already visited a fossil site near Bärschwil. Hans R. Stampfli quotes the zoologist Johann Jakob von Tschudi in his Gressly biography (1986) : “He has nothing in the world apart from stones, and I believe that by breaking a fossil shell in front of his eyes, one could cause hysterical convulsions . "

From 1836 Gressly stayed for several years mainly in Neuchâtel , where he worked together with Carl Vogt and Eduard Desor as an employee of Louis Agassiz . Agassiz had become aware of Gressly's rich and well-ordered collection of petrefacts in Bärschwil and invited him to Neuchâtel. In the preface to his monograph on the clams , Agassiz explains that Gressly owes most of the material for the work. A newly discovered genus of fossil clams was named by Agassiz in honor of his assistant Gresslya .

Gressly, however, never felt at home in Neuchâtel; In a letter from January 1845 to Prof. Schlatter in Solothurn he writes: "Neuchâtel seems more dead and down-to-earth than ever and without Agassiz I would hardly spend the night here." In March of the same year Gressly left the city; A stay of several years was only possible again from mid-1855 to 1863. Gressly also felt disappointed by Agassiz, who was originally revered as a role model and who took some of the most beautiful pieces from Gressly's collection with him when he emigrated to the United States , although it remains unclear to what extent this was agreed . Agassiz also allegedly dropped an offer to take Gressly to America.

During his time in Neuchâtel, Gressly stayed in the city of Solothurn quite often. After he had recovered from a nervous breakdown shortly after completing his Observations géologiques sur le Jura Soleurois (1841), a longer stay in Solothurn resulted from an order from the education authority of the canton of Solothurn to set up an exhibition of his collections in the building of the canton school . In the ten years following the first time in Neuchâtel, Gressly never stayed in one place for long, but instead wandered around the entire area of ​​the Jura Mountains in research .

From the beginning of the 1850s, Gressly was called in by the Swiss Central Railway as a geological surveyor when building several railway lines in the Jura, including the Hauenstein line and the Basel - Laufen - Delémont - Sonceboz - Biel line . The geological profile created in this context for the first Hauenstein tunnel became very well known. Gressly lived in Olten for a few months , but during this time he also frequently visited the branch of the English tunneling company Thomas Brassey in Buckten . On this occasion he learned the English language . Work on further railway projects followed, such as the profile for the tunnel under the Vue des Alpes between the Val de Ruz and La Chaux-de-Fonds ( Loges tunnel ), where Gressly's geological forecasts for the tunnel construction proved to be almost completely correct. Alfred Hartmann (1814–1897) wrote in his portrait of Gressly in 1868 that the geological society in London welcomed this correspondence between theory and practice as a brilliant triumph of science .

Gressly undertook further trips: in 1859 to the south of France, to the Golfe du Lion to study the marine animals there with Desor, and in 1861 under the direction of Georg Berna to the North Cape , the island of Jan Mayen and Iceland , together with Carl Vogt and the Painter Heinrich Hasselhorst .

Gressly suffered from mental health problems from his youth, which increased in the 1860s. From mid-1864 he was being treated in the Waldau psychiatric clinic in Bern. He seemed to be on the mend when he died unexpectedly on April 13, 1865 of complications from a stroke .

Amanz Gressly is buried in the St. Niklaus cemetery near Solothurn. The Latin epitaph reads:

Gresslius interiit lapidum consumptus amore,
Undique collectis non fuit hausta fames.
Ponimus hoc saxum. Mehercle! totus opertus
Gresslius hoc saxo, nunc satiatus erit.

The self-deprecating inscription - originally attributed to Gressly himself, but, as noted by Stampfli (1993) with reference to M. Schwarzbach (1981), Latinized by Gressly based on a mineralogist's grave inscription published in 1796 - is translated by Alfred Hartmann as follows:

Here lies Gressly, who died of a strange love for the stones;
Those he collected at home did not satisfy his hunger.
Let's set this stone. From the stone, God
punished me, completely covered, resting between the stones, he now has enough stones.

Scientific importance

The use of the term facies in geology goes back to Gressly , which was first introduced in his main work Observations géologiques sur le Jura Soleurois, which appeared in three parts from 1838 to 1841 . Gressly is considered to be one of the founders of modern stratigraphy and paleoecology ; so he had already developed the principle that later became known as the facies rule according to Johannes Walther . "Gressly developed a consistent, logical and comprehensive definition of a new stratigraphic paradigm, which represented the basis for further developments and refinements."

The dinosaur species Gresslyosaurus , first described in 1857 and possibly identical to the Plateosaurus, was named after Amanz Gressly .

Amanz Grezssly (1814–1865) geologist, paleontologist. Dig. Field fountain- St. Niklaus
Dig. Field fountain- St. Niklaus

personality

Amanz Gressly was considered a nerd by contemporaries. His clothes were mostly sloppy and he often had a wild beard. In human interaction, Gressly was from reserved to shy, but also very warm. Stampfli writes: Today he might be described as a dropout, outside of all conventions, but endowed with an extraordinarily high level of intelligence and cites a necrology from the London Geological Magazine (1865):

“He was a child of the people, loved and known by all. Possessing vast knowledge and most profoundly acquainted with the structure of our mountains, yet was he simple and unostentatious. Gressly had no enemies, envy and jealousy had no place in his heart; he was, as it were, an echo of another age. No one was more popular than he in the Jura; from the Perthe-du-Rhône to the Rhine there was not a village in which he did not count friends, and where his arrival was not saluted with acclamations. "

Amanz Grezssly (1814–1865) geologist, paleontologist. Dig. Field fountain- St. Niklaus
Tombstone. Field fountain- St. Niklaus

In his gallery of famous Swiss of the modern age (1868), Alfred Hartmann had a friend of Gressly draw the following portrait of the outwardly uncultivated scholar , drawn from nature and well taken:

“A man of medium stature with a shaggy beard; the gray, bent felt hat is carelessly pressed onto the frizzy hair. Below the steep forehead, under crooked bushy eyebrows, two keenly observing eyes peek out through the glasses; and the friendly smile, often playing around the corners of the mouth, betrays a harmless childlike good-naturedness. The slightly bent forward posture of the body and the clumsy step are the characteristics of a man who knows better about the rough, arduous paths of the mountains than on the smooth parquet floor of the elegant salons ... From the wide pocket of the gray, always unbrushed, often torn skirt looks at the emblem of his science, the geologist's hammer ... To complete the picture, you need a few calloused hands that rarely came into contact with soap and water, a pair of heavy, nailed mountain boots and a burning cigar in your mouth. "

Posthumous honors

Memorial stone in the Verena Gorge

The geologist, known through his extensive research trips throughout the Jura region and popular for his original nature, was given various monuments, some shortly after his death:

  • In the Verena Gorge near Solothurn there is a memorial stone donated by the Pottery Society , a Solothurn lecture association.
  • A memorial created by the Ticino sculptor Remo Rossi was erected at the schoolhouse in his birthplace in Bärschwil .
  • A memorial plaque is attached to the outside wall of the Laufen BL museum .
  • Amanz-Gressly-Strasse in Solothurn .
  • The Swiss Paleontological Society has been awarding an Amanz-Gressly award for special merits in palaeontology since 2004 .

Works

  • Observations geologiques sur le Jura Soleurois. Vol. 1-3. (= New memoranda of the general Swiss society for the entire natural sciences. Vols. 2, 4, 5). Imprimerie de Petitpierre, Neuchâtel 1838–1841.
  • Amanz Gressly's letters. (= Lettres d'Amand Gressly, le géologue jurassien (1814–1865) / rassemblées et annotées par le Dr. Louis Rollier. ) Imprimerie du “Petit Jurassien”, Moutier 1911.

literature

  • Alfred Hartmann: Amanz Gressly. In: Gallery of famous Swiss of modern times. Volume 1. Friedrich Hasler, Baden 1868, Article 36.
  • Hugo Ledermann: The Scientific Significance of Amanz Gressly. In: Jura leaves. 27 (1965), pp. 70-72.
  • Emil Kuhn-Schnyder:  Gressly, Amanz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 50 ( digitized version ).
  • Hans R. Stampfli: Amanz Gressly, 1814–1865: Life picture of an extraordinary person. Separately printed from: Notices from the Natural Research Society of the Canton of Solothurn. 32 (1986). Also published: Supplements and Corrections, 1993.
  • Simon Lutz: Amanz Gressly , anniversary publication from 2014 - 200 years since his birth in 1814.
  • Urs Amacher: Origin and distribution of the baptismal name Amantius / Amanz. In: Contributions to name research. 52 (2017), pp. 169–176.

Web links

Commons : Amanz Gressly  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans R. Stampfli: Amanz Gressly, 1814-1865 . Life picture of an extraordinary person. [Sl] 1986, p. 28 (Separate print from: Communications from the Natural Research Society of the Canton of Solothurn; 32 (1986)).
  2. ↑ Hans R. Stampfli: Amanz Gressly, 1814-1865 . Life picture of an extraordinary person. [Sl] 1986, p. 64 (Separate print from: Communications of the Natural Research Society of the Canton of Solothurn; 32 (1986)).
  3. ↑ Amanz Gressly: Amanz Gressly's letters = Lettres d'Amand Gressly, le géologue jurassien (1814-1865) . Ed .: Louis Rollier. Imprimerie du "Petit Jurassien", Moutier 1911, p. 42 .
  4. ^ Alfred Hartmann: Amanz Gressly . In: Gallery of famous Swiss of modern times . tape 1 . Friedrich Hasler, Baden 1868, p. 3, Article No. 36 .
  5. ^ Alfred Hartmann: Amanz Gressly . In: Gallery of famous Swiss of modern times . tape 1 . Friedrich Hasler, Baden 1868, p. 4, Article No. 36 .
  6. ↑ Timothy A. Cross, Peter W. Homewood: Amanz Gressly's role in founding modern stratigraphy (abstract). In: GSA Bulletin; Volume 109, No. 12 (Dec 1997). The Geological Society of America, December 1997, pp. 1617-1630 , accessed October 9, 2010 .
  7. ^ RT quoted from: Hans R. Stampfli: Amanz Gressly, 1814–1865 . Life picture of an extraordinary person. [Sl] 1986, p. 19 (Separate print from: Communications of the Natural Research Society of the Canton of Solothurn; 32 (1986)).
  8. ^ Alfred Hartmann: Amanz Gressly . In: Gallery of famous Swiss of modern times . tape 1 . Friedrich Hasler, Baden 1868, p. 2, Article No. 36 .
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on June 2, 2006 .
personal data
SURNAME Gressly, Amanz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss geologist and paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1814
PLACE OF BIRTH Bärschwil
DATE OF DEATH April 13, 1865
Place of death Bern