George Jarvis Brush

George Jarvis Brush (born December 15, 1831 in Brooklyn , New York , † February 6, 1912 ) was an American mineralogist .

Life

George Brush was the son of a successful import merchant and joined Theodore S. Gold's school in West Cornwall ( Connecticut ) when he was 15 , where his interest in science arose. He first worked for a trading company in New York City and then went into agriculture due to illness. In 1848 he attended lectures on chemistry, agriculture, mineralogy and metallurgy in New Haven with Benjamin Silliman at Yale University . In 1850 he became an assistant to Silliman at the University of Louisville (Silliman taught chemistry and toxicology in the medical school) and was accepted into the graduate program of the Sheffield School of Science at Yale, where he received his doctorate in 1852. He then went to the University of Virginia in 1852/53 (where he published his first work on minerals in the American Journal of Science ) before traveling to Europe, where he made contact with European mineralogists and chemists. He was in Munich with Justus von Liebig , Franz von Kobell and Max von Pettenkofer and at the Bergakademie Freiberg.

In 1855 he became professor of metallurgy at the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, but spent another year in England at the Royal School of Mines and studying mines and smelters in England. In 1864 he also took over the teaching of mineralogy and from 1871 he was only professor of mineralogy. He became director of the Sheffield Scientific School in 1872 and from then on devoted himself almost exclusively to administrative tasks - from 1884 onwards he no longer gave any lectures. Samuel Lewis Penfield became professor of mineralogy in 1893 , and he had been an instructor there from 1879. In 1898 he retired, but remained associated with the school as secretary, treasurer and chairman of the board of directors. In 1904 he donated his collection of 15,000 minerals to the school, later it came to the Peabody Museum of Natural History . Brush was one of the trustees of the Peabody Museum, adding to the original George Peabody foundation through clever investment.

His Manual of Determinative Mineralogy saw many editions and was later edited by Penfield. Brush himself edited the new editions of Dana's System of Mineralogy (by James Dwight Dana ) from 1854 (4th edition). From 1863 to 1879 he was co-editor of the American Journal of Science.

In addition to his work, he also had board positions in industry, he was a director of the Jackson Iron Co. in the Lake Superior District and a director of the New Haven, New York and Hartford Railroad from 1893.

Honors and memberships

A new mineral first described by Charles Upham Shepard in 1856 as epiglaubite was scientifically precisely described again in 1865 by Gideon Emmet Moore (1842–1895) and named brushite in honor of Brush .

In 1868 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences , in 1871 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1879 an honorary member of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland . In 1886 he received an honorary doctorate in law from Harvard University . He was also a member of the Geological Society of London and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (since 1862).

Fonts

• Manual of determinative Mineralogy , 1874 (expanded edition 1898 with Penfield)

literature

• Edward S. Dana , obituary in Biographical Memoirs National Academy of Sciences (previously published in American Journal of Science 1912)

Web links

• Biography at the Peabody Museum

References and comments

1. ↑ The science school founded by Yale in 1846, named after a founder from 1860 Sheffield School.
2. ↑ Charles Upham Shepard: Five new mineral species , in: The American Journal of Science and Arts , Volume 22 (1856), pp. 96–99 ( PDF 390.9 kB )
3. ↑ Gideon Emmet Moore: On brushite, a new mineral occurring in phosphatic guano , in: The American Journal of Science and Arts , Volume 39 (1865), pp. 43–44 ( PDF 126.6 kB )