Alexandre Brongniart

Life

He was born in Paris, the son of the architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart and father of the botanist Adolphe-Théodore Brongniart.

In 1788, he co-founded the French Philomathic Society of Paris.

In 1797, he became an instructor of natural history at the Central School of the Four Nations, and became the professor of mineralogy in 1822 at the Museum of Natural History in Paris.

He was appointed in 1800 by Napoleon's minister of the interior Lucien Bonaparte director of the revitalized porcelain manufactory at Sèvres, holding this role until death. The young man took to the position a combination of his training as a scientist— especially as a mining engineer relevant to the chemistry of ceramics— his managerial talents and financial acumen and his cultivated understanding of neoclassical esthetic. He remained in charge of Sèvres, through regime changes, for 47 years.

Brongniart introduced a new classification of reptiles and wrote several treatises on mineralogy and the ceramic arts. He also made an extensive study of trilobites and made pioneering contributions to stratigraphy by developing fossil markers for dating strata.

He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1819 and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1823.

Work In his early ages, Brongniart focused on the studies of reptiles and published Essai d'une classification naturelle des reptiles in 1800, which he compared the anatomy of reptiles in order to classify them into different groups. From the Much Wenlock Limestone Formation, Homerian Stage, Wenlock Series, Dudley, West Midlands, UK. The most significant geological work for Brongniart was Essai sur la géographie minéralogique des environs de Paris in collaboration with Georges Cuvier on studies of geology around Paris in 1811.

Another significant contribution in stratigraphy was using the fossil content in the strata he examined in Paris to identify strata in other locations instead of depth or lithology, as rocks can not be expected to have the exact same characteristics or depth if deposited under different conditions.

In 1822, Brongniart published the first full-length study of trilobites in which he classified a variety from Europe and North America and tried to group them based on age. This work contributed to later work on Paleozoic stratigraphy.

Publications Essai d'une classification naturelle des reptiles (1800)

Botanical reference