Constant Prévost

Louis Constant Prévost (born June 4, 1787 in Paris , † August 14, 1856 there ) was a French geologist.

Constant Prévost

Prévost was the son of a tax farmer and studied medicine, zoology and geology in Paris with Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart (his mentor), graduating in 1811. He accompanied Brongniart in 1807 on excursions in Brittany, Normandy and the Pyrenees and visited with him 1812 Abraham Gottlob Werner at the Bergakademie in Freiberg. He went on study trips to Austria, where he noticed similarities between the Vienna Basin and the Paris Basin in the Tertiary, and to Normandy, whose Mesozoic strata he compared with those of southern England. From 1821 to 1829 he was professor of geology at the Athenaeum, from 1829 at the École des Arts et Manufactures and in 1831 professor of geology at the Sorbonne.

Like Charles Lyell, he was a supporter of gradual, slow changes in the history of the earth, which could still be studied today ( actualism , then also called uniformitalism), in contrast to Cuvier's catastrophism . He himself studied volcanism in Italy and the Auvergne, among other places . In 1831 he witnessed the eruption of the underwater volcano Ferdinandea off the south coast of Sicily ( called the island of July by him , he published a report about it in 1835).

In 1834, 1839 and 1851 he was President of the French Geological Society, of which he was one of the founders in 1830, and was a member of the Académie des Sciences from 1848 as the successor to Brogniard.

Fonts

• De la Chronologie des terrains et du synchronisme des formations , 1845
• Documents pour l'histoire des terrains tertiaires , Paris 1827
• with E. Bassano Traité de geographie physique , Paris 1836

Web links

• Literature by and about Constant Prévost in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
• Gabriel Gohau Constantin Prévost et la théorie de soulèvement