Parker Cleaveland

Parker Cleaveland ( born January 15, 1780 in Byfield, Massachusetts, † October 15, 1858 in Brunswick, Maine ) was an American mineralogist.

Life

Cleaveland first visited in his home village of the Dummer Academy and studied from 1795 at Harvard University. In 1799 he got there his class Bachelor title. Then he prepared himself for a career as a lawyer, moved in the meantime to theology, but he also gave up when his alma mater him a job as a lecturer in mathematics and " natural philosophy " offering. In 1805 he moved to Bowdoin College in Maine, where he taught until his death in 1858. As a scientific generalist, he conducted research on a variety of topics, among other things, he discussed the issues of meteorology, paleontology, chemistry, and agriculture. In 1820, he was also a professor of materia medica for the construction of the medical faculty at Bowdoin ( the Medical School of Maine) responsible. But he was particularly interested in geology and mineralogy, in particular; In 1816 he published with An Elementary Treatise on Mineralogy and Geology a textbook on these disciplines, which became the standard work, at least in the United States; often it is referred to as the "Father of American Mineralogy ".

Honors

After the Cleavelandit Cleaveland was named in 1822, a leafy variety of the mineral albite. 1823 Dartmouth College awarded him an honorary doctorate.

It is believed that the often quite eccentric acting Cleaveland was the model for the chemist Dr. Cacaphodel in Nathaniel Hawthorne 's short story The Great Carbuncle (1836 ). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who studied in Bowdoin, together with Hawthorne, praised Cleaveland 1875 in a poem.

Works

• Vocabulary Explanation of Certain Chemical Containing at term: More Particularly Those Which Relate to the Chemical Nomenclature. Without place, no date (probably before 1816).
• An Elementary Treatise on Mineralogy and Geology. Cummings and Hilliard, Boston, 1816; second, revised edition 1822.
• Results of Meteorological Observations Made at Brunswick, Maine, in between 1807 and 1859. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 1867. ( = Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge 16:3 ).