Adolphe d'Archiac

Adolphe d' Archiac, Étienne Jules Adolphe full name Desmier de Saint -Simon, Vicomte d' Archiac, (* September 24, 1802 in Reims, † December 24, 1868 in Paris) was a French geologist and paleontologist. He was a pioneer in the geological exploration of Europe and described numerous fossils. His botanical author abbreviation is " D' Archiac ".

Life

Born in Reims, he received his education at the Military School of Saint- Cyr, and served for nine years as a cavalry officer. During his service, he was indeed a writer, but his field of interest was not science: in 1828 he published a three-volume historical romance in which the Moslem prince Zizim conquered the Byzantine Empire, and in 1930 a study on the development of literature and customs since the fall Napoleon. After the July Revolution of 1830, he quit the service and turned to the geology and paleontology to. After three decades of geological research that brought him acclaim from the sizes of the French geology as Alexandre Brongniart, Armand Dufrenoy and Léonce Élie de Beaumont, was d' Archiac 1861 as the successor of Alcide Dessalines d' Orbigny professor of paleontology at the Muséum national d ' histoire naturelle appointed.

In a fit of depression, he committed suicide on Christmas Eve 1868 suicide by throwing himself into the Seine and drowned.

Work

D' Archiacs early research center of the 1830 years focused on the Tertiary and the Cretaceous of France, Belgium and England, in particular on the distribution and sequence of fossils. As part of this work, he formulated some basic principles about the occurrence of fossils in the geological tradition, especially in the co-authored with Edouard de Verneuil work On the fossils of the older deposits in the Rhenish Provinces about the Rhenish Slate Mountains. Later he extended his work on the Carboniferous, Devonian and Silurian. In 1847 he published the first volume of his extensive work Histoire des progrès de la géologie de 1834 à 1859, published in volumes 1847-1860. In 1867 he published together with Jules Haime ( 1824-1856 ), a monograph of the nummulites formation of India. Among his publications in the 1860s Representatives include the Paleontology stratigraphique mentioned in three volumes (1864 and 1865 ), the textbook Géologie et paléontologie of 1866 and its paleontological contributions to Pyotr Alexandrovich Tschichatschows Asie mineure from the same year.

Honors

1844, 1849 and 1854 was chairman of the Société d' Archiac géologique de France. In 1857 he received the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London and was elected in the same year as a member of the Académie des sciences. In 1861 he was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Legion of Honour.