Jules Marcou

Jules Marcou (born April 20, 1824 in Salins-les-Bains , † April 17, 1898 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ) was a French geologist who worked mainly in the United States.

Life

Marcou came from the French Jura, went to school in Besançon , in Dijon and at the Collège Saint Louis in Paris, but was often ill and had to drop out of training. In his home town of Salines he was introduced to geology by the doctor Claude-Marie Germain. On several study trips to the French and Swiss Jura, some of which he undertook to recover, he met Jules Thurmann (1804–1855) and through this made the acquaintance of Louis Agassiz (1845). From 1846 he was taxidermist for natural history with the mineralogy professor at the Sorbonne Gabriel Delafosse (1796-1878) and in 1847 he was taxidermist for paleontology with Louis Cordier at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle , on whose behalf he also worked as a geologist for collecting in 1848 the USA was sent. There he accompanied Louis Agassiz on a six-month trip to the Great Lakes region (copper mines on the Keweenaw Peninsula , Lake Huron and Niagara) and in New York State. In 1849 he toured New Jersey , Pennsylvania and Virginia and later the Allegheny Mountains , Kentucky with Mammoth Cave and eastern Canada. In 1850 he returned shortly after his marriage to Europe and in 1853 was a geologist in the Pacific Railroad Survey along the 35th parallel (under Lieutenant AW Whipple). He was also in California in 1854, where he visited the gold fields and San Francisco and returned to the east coast via Panama.

From 1856 to 1859 he was Professor of Geology and Paleontology at the ETH Zurich , which he gave up for health reasons, and in 1860 he was back in the USA, where he helped Louis Agassiz in Boston to found the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. During the American Civil War he undertook further research trips to war zones (1861 to 1863 in the Appalachians, 1863 in Kansas and Nebraska). From 1864 to 1875 he was in Salines in France, but less is known about this time. In 1875 he was a member of the Wheeler Survey of Southern California (part of the US Geographical Survey West of the One Hundredth Meridian ). From 1878 to 1881 he is back in France (although he spent part of the winter in Algeria for health reasons), and from 1881 he lived again in the USA and lived in Cambridge (Massachusetts).

Besides Agassiz, he was friends with Louis Pasteur (his school friend in Besançon) and Joachim Barrande . In 1847 he went on excursions with Oscar Fraas in Württemberg and the Black Forest. He led some violent campaigns, so in 1892 against the organization of the US Geological Survey by John Wesley Powell and he was also involved in some disputes in France, especially with Edmond Hébert .

In 1845 he became a member of the French Geological Society, in 1870 of the Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Besançon and in 1861 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1867 he received the Cross of the Legion of Honor. In 1875 he became a corresponding member and in 1879 a member of the Geological Society of London .

He married Jane Belknap, daughter of historian Jeremy Belknap, in Boston in 1850 and had three children. The marriage made him financially independent.

Fonts

Notice on the différentes formations des terrains jurassiques dans le Jura occidental, Neuchatel 1846
Recherches géologiques sur le Jura salinois, Mémoirs Société géologique de France, Paris, 1846 (published 1848)
On the geology of the United States and the British Provinces of North America, Gotha: Perthes 1855
Carte géologique des États-Unis et des provinces anglaises de l'Amérique du Nord, Bulletin de la Société géologique de France, 1855 (scale 1: 14 million)
American geology: letter on some points of the geology of Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, and Nebraska, addressed to Messrs. FB Meek and FV Hayden, Zurich 1858
Geology of North America: with two reports on the prairies of Arkansas and Texas, the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico, and the Sierra Nevada of California, originally made for the United States government, Zurich 1858
Dyas et Trias: ou le nouveau grès rouge en Europe dans l'Amérique du Nord et dans l'Inde, Geneva 1859
Carte geologique de la Terre (on a scale of 1: 23 million), Winterthur, 1861, 2nd edition 1875 (Explication d'une seconde édition de la Carte géologique de la terre, Zurich, Wurster, 1875, constructed by JM Ziegler)
Lettres sur les roches du Jura et leur distribution geographique dans les deux hémisphères, Paris, F. Klincksieck, 1857–1860
Letter to M. Joachim Barrande on the Taconic rocks of Vermont and Canada, Cambridge / Massachusetts 1862
De la science en France, Paris: Reinwald 1869
Les Géologues et la Géologie du Jura jusqu'en 1870, Lons le Saunier 1886
Amerriques, Amerigho Vespucci, et Amérique, Paris 1892
Souvenirs d'un géologue sur Panama et le Canal de Panama, Neuchatel 1893
Publisher and Author: Life, Letters and Work of Louis Agassiz, Macmillan 1895, Archives
The Jura of Texas, Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, Volume 27, 1896, pp. 149-158

literature

Michel Durand-Delga , Richard Moreau: Jules Marcou (1824–1898) précurseur français de la géologie nord-américaine, L'Harmattan, 2003.

Web links

Wikisource: Jules Marcou - Sources and full texts (English)

personal data
SURNAME	Marcou, Jules
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French geologist
DATE OF BIRTH	April 20, 1824
PLACE OF BIRTH	Salins-les-Bains
DATE OF DEATH	April 17, 1898
Place of death	Cambridge , Massachusetts