Nicolas Desmarest
Nicolas Desmarest (born September 16, 1725 in Soulaines , † September 28, 1815 in Paris ) was a French geologist. His son was the zoologist Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest .
Live and act
Desmarest was the only child of Jean Desmarest, a rural teacher and his wife Marguerite Clement. When his father died and his mother remarried in February 1741, Desmarest was sent to the college of the Oratorians of Troyes , Oratoriens de Troyes . Here he received a solid education. So that he left Troyes at the end of 1746 and the beginning of 1747 for Paris. From 1757 he was active on behalf of the French state in the improvement of manufactories and the dissemination of technological knowledge. By 1788 he was promoted to general inspector and director of the manufactories. He was imprisoned in the French Revolution in 1792 and barely escaped execution, but was then back in civil service. In 1771 he became a member of the Académie des sciences .
In the 1760s he demonstrated the volcanic origin of the basalt (formation in lava flows) when he was touring the Auvergne volcanic area in 1763/64. The origin of the basalt was controversial in the 18th century, and especially in the 1770s, the Neptunists around Abraham Gottlob Werner tried to explain the columnar shape of basalt as crystallization and precipitation in water and became the leading school in Germany. Desmarest also recognized the role of erosion in the formation of river valleys and published his geological findings. His main work on this was his Dictionnaire de Géographie Physique in 4 volumes, with a fifth being added posthumously.
In 1761, he visited the dairies and cheese factories in Franche-Comté and Lorraine . He wrote in Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie on the art of making cheese, l'Art de fabriquer le fromage , but also articles on physical geography, geographie physique and the fountain, fontaine .
Fonts
- Dissertation on l'ancienne jonction de l'Angleterre à la France . Paris 1753
- Conjectures physico-méchaniques sur la propagation des secousses dans les tremblemens de terre, et sur la disposition des lieux qui en ont ressenti les effets . [Paris,] 1756
- Mémoire sur l'origine et la nature du basalte à grandes colonnes polygones, determinées par l'histoire naturelle de cette pierre, observée en Avergne In: Mémoires de l'Académie Royale des Sciences à Paris pour 1771 (and 1773)
- Dictionnaire de Géographie physique , 5 volumes, Paris, [1794/95] -1828 (in the Encyclopédie méthodique)
literature
- Hermann Rudolf Weber: The morphological views of Nikolas Desmarest. A contribution to the history of morphology in the 18th century. Leipzig, 1932.
Web links
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Desmarest, Nicolas |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French geologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 16, 1725 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Soulaines |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 28, 1815 |
| Place of death | Paris |