Alexandre Brongniart

Alexandre Brongniart (5 February 1770 – 7 October 1847) was a French chemist, mineralogist, geologist, paleontologist and zoologist, who collaborated with Georges Cuvier on a study of the geology of the region around Paris. He was the first to classify Tertiary formations and was responsible for determining geology studies as a subject of science by collecting evidence and informations in the 19th century.

Brongniart was also the founder of the Musée national de Céramique-Sèvres (National Museum of Ceramics), having been director of the Sèvres Porcelain Factory from 1800 to 1847.

Life

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

In 1797, he became an instructor of natural history at the École Centrale des Quatre-Nations, and became the professor of minerology in 1822 at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle 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.

In 1823, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Work

In 1800, Brongniart published Essai d’une classification naturelle des reptiles which he compared the anatomy of reptiles in order to classify them into different groups. The four classifications were chelonians, saurians, ophidians, and batrachians. Batrachians is the only group that is no longer recognized as reptiles as they are amphibians.

Brongniart worked with Cuvier to determine how old fossils were. Their paper “Essai sur la geographie mineralogique des environs de Paris” identified nine formations that had been formed over a very long period of time. The formations, starting with the oldest, were called the Chalk, Argile Plastique, Calcaire grossier, Calcaire silicieux, Formation gypseuse, Sabels et Gres marins, Gres sans coquilliers, Terrain d’eau douce, and Limon d’aterrissement. Brongniart found that some of the strata had marine mollusk fossils, and some had fresh water mollusk fossils. He used the alternation of these marine and fresh water layers to disproved the theory that strata was deposited by a shrinking ocean.

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’t 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

• Traite Elementaire de Mineralogie (1807)

Family

His wife was Cecile Coquebert de Montbret (1782–1862), the daughter of the French consul to England, Charles-Etienne Coquebert de Montbret. They had three children together. Their son, Adolphe-Théodore Brongniart, became a major figure in the study of paleobotany. Their daughter Hermine (1803–1890) married Jean Baptiste Dumas, and their other daughter Mathilde (1808–1882) married Jean Victoir Audouin.

Botanical reference