Joseph Ritter von Petzl

Joseph Ritter von Petzl , completely Johann Nepomuk Joseph Petzl , (born August 26, 1764 in Lohkirchen , † April 7, 1817 in Munich ) was a Bavarian Catholic clergyman, mineralogist and naturalist .

Life

Petzl studied from 1777 Catholic theology in Freising , from 1782 in Salzburg and from 1783 in Ingolstadt , where he received his doctorate in theology and obtained his licentiate. In 1787 he was ordained a diocesan priest in Freising .

After the introduction of the Order of Malta (Order of St. John) he was accepted into the religious class as a deacon or chaplain in 1790. He also traveled to the headquarters of the order in Malta and completed the sea ​​voyages prescribed for the higher service (receiving a coming ). In Malta, he began to acquire a collection of conchylia and minerals and became involved in architectural drawing. In 1799 he was back in Munich and took over the Kommende Möschenfeld , based in Munich , which was awarded to him in 1797 . In 1803 he received the Malteser Kommende Altötting and headed the priests' house in the local pilgrimage site until the order was abolished in Bavaria in 1808.

In 1802 he became a full member of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences in the physical class and from 1804 taught at the Lyzeum in Munich as a professor of experimental physics and natural history. He also taught mineralogy at the Royal General Mining Administration. In 1809 he became curator of the mineralogical collection of the Academy of Sciences and wrote a catalog of the mineral collection. In 1817 he died of a stroke.

In a lecture given to the Accademia Letteraria di Malta in 1794, he was the first to scientifically deal with the island's fossils . The manuscript is in the Valletta Library and the first page of the lecture in the Malta Government Gazette from 1794. There he also goes into the nature of the fossils, which according to him correspond to animals still alive (and thus would not be a joke of nature ), even if they now live in seas far away, and their fossilization by a fossilizing liquid ( sugo petrificante ) which penetrates the sediment pores. He admired the beauty of the echinoderm fossils well preserved in Malta and was the first to recognize the relationship of some fossils to Indo-Pacific forms (they came from the former Tethys Ocean). According to him, the process of fossilization is a very slow one and the fossils would also bear witness to the many changes that have taken place in the earth since the Flood.

Fonts (selection)

• The Bavarian Government's Endeavor to Disseminate Nonprofit Science . Munich; Lindauer; 1804; 31 p. ( Digitized version )
• Examination of the prejudice of some students against certain sciences and objects . Read in the local k. Liceum at the end of the winter semester in the academic year 1807 ( digital copy )
• Preparatory oryctognosia; on the use of his mineral lectures , Munich 1807 ( digitized version )
• About the current state of the mineralogical collections of the Royal Academy of Sciences together with the previous historical account from their creation to the present time . Munich; Cancellation; 1814. ( digitized version )

literature

• Clemens Alois Baader , obituary. In: Journal for Bavaria and neighboring countries , Volume 2, 1817, pp. 368-370.
• Clemens Alois Baader: Lexicon of deceased Bavarian writers , Volume 2, Augsburg 1825, pp. 245–247 ( digitized version ).
• Mathias von Flurl , obituary in Eos 84, 1819, pp. 334–335; 85, 1819, pp. 337-339.
• Barbara Sperling:  Petzl, Johann Nepomuk Joseph. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , pp. 274 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Joseph Ritter von Petzl, Bavarian Academy of Sciences, with portrait

Remarks

1. ↑ G. Zammit Maempel: The earliest “Treatise” on Maltese Fossils In: Melita Historica 8, 1981, pp. 133–148 ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . He appears there under the name Abbate Bettz. The title of the manuscript is Discorso Accademico / Delle Petrificazioni / di Malta / del Sigr Abbate Bettz / Gerosolmitano Bavaro / letto dal Medesimo nell Accademia Letteraria di Malta il dì 6 Ottobre 1794 .