Charles Upham Shepard

Charles Upham Shepard ( born June 29, 1804 in Little Compton, Newport County, Rhode Iceland, † May 1, 1886 in Charleston, South Carolina) was an American mineralogist.

Life and work

Charles Upham Shepard was born in 1804 as son of the parish priest Moses Shepard and his wife Deborah Haskins. He pursued his education in 1820, first at Brown University, but after a year at Amherst College, where he also received his degree in 1824 and from 1845 as a full professor of chemistry and natural history worked until his retirement in 1877. Among his most important discoveries were phosphate deposits of great economic value in South Carolina.

Shepard was an avid collector, especially of minerals, but also of meteorites, fossils, shells and plants. Its extensive collections, which only included 25,000 mineral specimens and allegedly even surpassed the public collections in London, Paris and Vienna in size and value, were housed in the Amherst College. A major fire in 1881/82, however, destroyed much of the collection. Shepart tried to rebuild the collection after the fire, giving him until his death in 1886, but only partially succeeded. Shepard's son, Charles Upham Shepard, Jr. (1842-1915) donated Amherst paternal mineral collection, and even added 170 meteorites.

Shepard described numerous new minerals, so among other things Danburit and Oxammit. Of the total of 140 published descriptions, however, about a dozen are only as independent minerals, as many were identified by later studies either as mineral mixtures or as previously known mineral such as, among others Beresofit or Beresowit as Krokoit, Ferrocolumbit as tantalite, Lederit as titanite and Partschit as schreibersite.

Works

Honors

Shepard was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge (Massachusetts), the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, and the Royal Society in Goettingen.

Several times Shepard should also be honored by mineral names. Labeled as an Shepardit mineral of Rose, however, turned out in later studies as identical with enstatite out, another described by Haidinger as schreibersite, and a third described Brooke as brucite.