MEMORIAL OF ALEXIS ANASTAY JULIEN x 

 BY JAMES F. KEMP 



In the loss of Alexis Anastay Julien May 4, 1919, the Fellowship of 

 the Geological Society was diminished by one of the pioneer American 

 petrographers, if indeed he was not actually the very first of American- 

 taught users of the polarizing microscope. His report on the lithology 

 of 259 rocks from the Huronian and Laurentian of the Upper Penin- 

 sula for volume II of the Michigan Geological Survey, published in 1873, 

 is, so far as known to the writer, the earliest contribution in which this 

 indispensable aid to investigation was employed in this country. 2 In 

 the subsequent years of the decade of the seventies, those American stu- 

 dents who followed microscopic petrography in the more advanced 

 courses of our colleges were trained upon sets of slides and collections 

 of rocks emanating from Dr. Julien's laboratory. In these latter days 

 of the universal employment of thin sections we may hark back in re- 

 spectful and appreciative memory of one who blazed a pioneer trail 

 through regions then unexplored. 



Dr. Julien was born in New York, February 13, 1840. His father, 

 Pierre Joseph Denis Julien, had come to America from Lourmarin, 

 Provence, France; while his mother, Magdalene Can tine, was a member 

 of an old Huguenot family, long settled in Ulster County, New York. 

 The parents educated their son at the Mount Washington Collegiate 

 Institute in New York, and from it, in 1856, entered him as a sophomore 

 in Union College, where he graduated in 1859, salutatorian of his class. 

 He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and, having manifested the special 

 interest in chemistry which he never lost during his later years,. he was 

 appointed assistant in the chemical laboratory the following year, under 

 Prof. Charles F. Chandler. 



In July, 1860, Alexis Julien became chemist of a company exploiting 

 the guano deposits of the island of Sombrero, in the West Indies, and 

 passed the next four years in its service. He had peculiar advantages 

 for the study of the natural history of the lime phosphates and of the 

 reactions produced by waters descending through bird guano to encounter 

 limestones lower down. The year following his return to New York we 



1 Manuscript received by the Secretary of the Society. 

 Presented in abstract December 29, 1919. 



2 The same volume (volume II of the Michigan reports) contains, in Appendix C, a 

 report by C. E. Wright on a collection of rocks, using the microscope, but the investiga- 

 tions were carried on at Freiberg, Saxony, with the aid of Professors Von Cotta and 

 Kreischer. 



