Home > Adolphe d'Archiac

He was born at Reims and educated in the Military School of St Cyr, and served for nine years as a cavalry officer until 1830, when he retired from the service. Prior to this he had published an historical romance; but now geology came to occupy his chief attention. In his earlier scientific works, which date from 1835, described the Tertiary and Cretaceous formations of France, Belgium and England, and dealt especially with the distribution of fossils geographically and in sequence. Later on he investigated the Carboniferous, DevonianThe Devonian is a major division of the geologic timescale that extends from the end of the Silurian period (360 million years before the present (BP)) to the beginning of the Mississippian subperiod of the Carboniferous (408. 5 million years BP). The Dev and SilurianAlternate use: The Silurians, a reptillian race from the science fiction series " Doctor Who . The Silurian is a major division of the geologic timescale that extends from about 408. 5 million years before the present (BP) with the end of the Ordovician p formations.

His great work was Histoire des Progrès de la Géologie de 1834 a 1859, published in 8 volumes (1847-1860). In 1853 the Wollaston MedalThe Wollaston Medal is a scientific award for geology, the highest award granted by the Geological Society of London. The medal is named after William Hyde Wollaston, and was first awarded in 1831. It was originally made of palladium, a metal discovered b of the Geological Society of LondonThe Geological Society of London is a learned society based in the United Kingdom with the aim of "investigating the mineral structure of the Earth". It is the oldest geological society in the world. The Society was founded in 1807. It was partly the outc was awarded to him. In the same year, with Jules Haime (1824-1856), he published a monograph on the Nummulitic formation of IndiaThe Republic of India is a large multicultural country in South Asia, with a population of over one billion. The Indian economy is the fourth largest in the world, in terms of purchasing power parity, and is the world's second-fastest growing economy.. In 1857 was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and in 1851 he was appointed professor of paleontology in the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in ParisEiffel Tower has become the symbol of Paris throughout the world. Paris is the capital and largest city of France. The city is built on an arc of the River Seine, and is thus divided into two parts: the Right Bank to the north and the smaller Left Bank to. Of later works his Paléontologie Stratigraphique, in 3 vols. (1864-1865); his Géologie et paléontologie (1866); and his paleontological contributions to de Tchihatcheff's Asie mineure (1866), may be specially mentioned. While suffering from severe depression he committed suicide by throwing himself into the River Seine on Christmas Eve, 1868.

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. 1911 Britannica