62 



OBITUARY. 



GABRIEL AUGUSTE DAUBREE. 

 Born June 25, 1814. Died May 29, 1896. 



EXPERIMENTAL Geology has lost, by the death of Professor 

 Daubree, one of its foremost exponents — a man who may be 

 regarded as having been almost the founder of the French synthetic 

 school. Much of his long life was devoted to the prosecution of 

 ■chemical, physical, and mechanical experiments, whereby he sought, 

 with singular success, to imitate in the laboratory many of the 

 phenomena of nature. Light was thrown by his researches upon 

 various subjects, which in an exceptional way need illumination; such 

 as the origin of mineral veins, the thermal and dynamic metamor- 

 phism of rocks, and the nature and affinities of meteorites. 



Daubree was born at Metz, but received his scientific training at 

 the Polytechnic School in Paris and passed thence to follow the pro- 

 fession of a mining engineer. At the age of only twenty-five he was 

 called to the chair of mineralogy and geology, then recently created 

 at Strasbourg — a position which he held for upwards of twenty years. 

 Early in his career he suggested an explanation of the origin of 

 deposits of tin-ore, insisting on the important part which compounds 

 of fluorine had probably played in their production, and supporting 

 his views by appeal to experiment. For his observations on the recent 

 formation of iron ores in lakes and bogs he received the medal of the 

 Dutch Society of Sciences at Haarlem. The distribution of gold in 

 the Valley of the Rhine was another subject which occupied his atten- 

 tion, and while at Strasbourg he prepared a geological map, with 

 description of the department of Bas-Rhin. His most successful 

 efforts in synthetic mineralogy were those in which he studied, under 

 circumstances of much difficulty and some danger, the action of super- 

 heated water on glass, and thereby produced artificial crystals of 

 quartz, augite, and certain zeolitic minerals. The production of 

 zeolites during historic times was strikingly demonstrated by his 

 classical study of the action of thermal waters on the brickwork at 

 the old Roman Baths of Plombieres. 



In 1861 Daubree followed Cordier as professor of geology in the 

 Natural History Museum in Paris, and was elected into the French 

 Academy as Cordier's successor. Subsequently he became professor 

 at the School of Mines, and in 1884 ^^ retired with the title of 

 Honorary Director of this institution. 



