Martin A. Peacock

Martin Alfred Peacock (born January 15, 1898 in Edinburgh , † October 30, 1950 ) was a British - Canadian mineralogist , geologist and crystallographer .

life and work

Peacock was the son of an engineer and grew up in Edinburgh and Glasgow . From 1915 he attended the University of Glasgow , interrupted by military service in World War I from 1917 with the Royal Flying Corps . His plane was shot down and he was a German prisoner of war for one year. He then continued his studies in Glasgow with a bachelor's degree in 1922, where he also studied music and graduated in piano from the Royal Academy of Music in London in 1923 . He then examined volcanic rocks from Iceland for his dissertation in Glasgow with JW Gregory in 1925 , both in the collection going back to CS Mackenzie in Glasgow and on site in Iceland. This also led to several publications on the geology and petrography of Iceland.

From 1926 he was at Harvard University , where he began to study crystallography under Charles Palache . He worked on the elucidation of the crystal structure of calaverite, an open problem at the time, and also traveled to Heidelberg to see Victor Moritz Goldschmidt , which resulted in a friendship (in 1933 he was in Heidelberg a few months after Goldschmidt's death to complete his unpublished work ). In 1929 he became a lecturer and then an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia , which ended in the 1932 Depression . On the Canadian west coast, among other things, he worked in the field of geomorphology with the fjords there. He was at Harvard from 1932 to 1937, where he was employed by Palache for the new edition (7th edition) of Dana's System of Mineralogy , which led to several mineralogical publications. He also learned the X-ray crystallographic methods that had just been introduced at Harvard. In 1937 he became a professor at the University of Toronto with a full professorship in mineralogy and crystallography from 1946.

Peacock is considered to be the first to describe a number of new minerals such as hedleyite (1945 together with Warren), montbrayite (1945 together with Thompson), parawollastonite (actually wollastonite-2M , 1935) and pararammelsbergite (1940 together with Dadson). In the case of the minerals Hauchecornite , Heazlewoodite , Maucherite , Parkerite and Shandite , he was able to determine their exact chemical composition and crystal structure.

In 1932 he received a D.Sc. in Glasgow. In 1948 he became President of the Mineralogical Society of America and he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada . In 1949 he was Vice President of the Geological Society of America .

Peacock had been married since 1937 and had two daughters.

Honors and memberships

The mineral pavonite is named after him (Pavo is peacock, English peacock, in Latin).

Peacock was an honorary member of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland .

Publications (selection)

• The vulcano-glacial palagonite formation of Iceland , 1926
• A contribution to the petrography of Iceland , 1924-25
• The distinction between chlorophaeite and palagonite , 1930
• Classification of igneous rock series , 1931

Web links

• Martin A. Peacock's writings in the WorldCat Bibliographical Index
• Obituary in The American Mineralogist, Volume 36, 1951, pdf by Charles Palache

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Webmineral