537 
a student together with his two royal brothers, the Duke of Sussex 
and the Duke of Kent. 
In Professor Blumenbach: the world has sustained a loss of one 
of those men of extraordinary genius whose talents are destined to 
exert a large influence on the knowledge and opinions of the age in 
which they live, and to advance permanently the progress of those 
sciences to which they have devoted their attention. 
M. J. M. Brocuant DE Vittiers, Member of the Institute of 
France, Inspector-General of Mines, and Professor of Geology at 
the Royal School of Mines in France, and Foreign Member of the 
Royal‘and Geological Societies of London, was the heir of an an- 
cient family, the members of which had held magisterial office and 
seats in the parliament of Paris. In early life he had applied him- 
self to the study of the law, but the events of the Revolution having 
changed his destination, he became a student at the Ecole Poly- 
technique, and in 1794 was the first pupil admitted to the Ecole 
des Mines, upon its remodelled establishment, of which he after- 
wards became one of the most distinguished ornaments. In 1800, 
at the age of 22, he was appointed Hingineur en Piéd, and pub- 
lished the first volume of his ‘ Treatise on Mineralogy, in which 
he set forth an analysis of the principles of the-Wernerian system, 
which had given so much celebrity to the school of Freyburg and 
were then but little known in France; and this work led to his ap- 
pointment as successor to the Abbé Hauy in the office of Professor 
of Geology and Mineralogy at the Heole des Mines, at that time 
transferred to Pesay in Savoy. From this favourable position he 
made frequent excursions with his pupils into the adjacent regions 
of the Alps, and gathered materials for his classic descriptions of a 
portion of these mountains, till then considered as primitiye, show- 
ing them to appertain to more recent formations, which he referred 
to the Wernerian transition system, and which subsequent observa- 
tions have proved to belong in part to the secondary series. _ 
On these excursions, he shared with his pupils the frugal repast 
of the chalet and the bed of straw, admitting them to the most un- 
reserved and instructive communication with him. 
In 1814, when Pesay was restored to the king of Sardinia, and 
the School of Mines again transferred to Paris, he returned with 
it, and continued to lecture on mineralogy and geology, each course 
occupying a year. 
In 1823 he was charged with the great national work of super- 
intending the construction of a geological map of France by two of 
his pupils, M. Dufrénoy and M. Elie de Beaumont, which he lived 
to see brought almost to the very point of publication. The follow- 
ing year he visited England, accompanied by M. Dutrenoy and 
M. Elie de Beaumont; and on this occasion he was fortunate in 
finding at home, in their respective districts, many of the most active 
geologists of this country, to whom it was a subject of gratification 
that they were permitted to conduct these distinguished visitors 
over many of the most instructive scenes of their special investiga- 
