J. Lawrence Smith

John Lawrence Smith (December 17, 1818 – October 12, 1883) was an American chemist and mineralogist.

He published extensively on analytical chemistry and mineralogy, including Mineralogy and Chemistry, Original Researches (1873; enlarged with biographical sketches, 1884). His collection of meteorites was the finest in the United States, and upon his death, he passed it to Harvard. The J. Lawrence Smith Medal is named in his honor. In 1846, he helped to establish the Medical and Surgical Journal of South Carolina. His tastes, however, clearly tended more towards chemical analysis than towards medicine. He spent much of his time improving methods for analytical chemistry, and applying them to problems in chemical analysis. naming it after Justus von Liebig.

Smith returned to the United States in 1850, and perfected the inverted microscope, an invention which he had begun working on while abroad. He was apparently offered a professorship at the University of New Orleans, but wrote in December, 1850, that it "at present exists but in name." Some of his papers from this period style him as professor of chemistry at the University of Louisiana (now Tulane University), New Orleans, Louisiana. By October 9, 1851, he was visiting Charleston. He described himself as a "peripatetic philosopher" and lamented his lack of a settled laboratory, writing "All my scientific labors have as yet been carried on in the Gipsey style."

After 1866, he spent much of his time traveling in Europe, collecting, studying and writing about "aerolites". His interest in meteorites predated his retirement from Louisville; his earliest paper on the subject was read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in April, 1854. The last paper he published, in the American Journal of Sciences, 1883, was "On the peculiar concretions in meteoric iron."

Smith served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1872) and of the American Chemical Society (1877).

Smith purchased a collection of meteorites that had belonged to Gerard Troost of Nashville, Tennessee, and extended it by collecting specimens from all over the world. He attempted to obtain specimens from as many different meteoric falls as possible. His collection was estimated to contain specimens from about two hundred and fifty falls, with a combined weight of around twenty-five hundred pounds, He wished his collection to be kept together, and after his death it became the property of Harvard College.