XXV 



Wilhelm Karl Ritter v. Haidinger was the fourth and youngest son 

 of Bergrath Karl Haidinger, one of the earliest cultivators of Mineralogy 

 and Geology in the Austrian Empire, Professor of Mathematics and Me- 

 chanics in the Mining Academy of Schemnitz, who afterwards held an 

 office in the Mint and Mining Department in Vienna, and was the author 

 of : — Dispositio Rerum naturalium Mussei Csesarei Vindobonensis ; on cer- 

 tain rare fossils ; on the minerals of the Wieliczka Salt-mines ; on v. 

 Born's method of amalgamation ; sketch of a systematic classification of 

 rocks ; and on the minerals sapphire, ruby, and spinelle. 



W. K. Haidinger was born in Vienna on the 5th of February, 1795, and 

 was educated in the Academic Gymnasium of that city. In the autumn 

 of 1812 he went to Gratz in order to profit by the teaching of Mohs, who 

 in that year gave his first course of lectures on Mineralogy at the Johan- 

 neum ; and about the end of the year 1817 followed him to Freiberg, shar- 

 ing in his mineralogical researches, and making many new observations 

 on the characters of several mineral species, which were never published 

 separately in his own name. In May 1822 he accompanied Count 

 August Breunner in a journey, undertaken in the interests of science, to 

 France and England. In the autumn of 1823 he went to live in the 

 house of Mr. Thomas Allan, Banker in Edinburgh, who was the pos- 

 sessor of a fine collection of minerals; and from the summer of 1825 till 

 the autumn of 1826 he travelled with Mr. Allan's son Robert through 

 Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, North Italy, and France. In 

 1825 he published an English translation of the Treatise on Minera- 

 logy by Mohs, with many additions and improvements. During the 

 3'ears 1822-1827 he contributed to the Transactions of the Roj'al Society 

 of Edinburgh, the Memoirs of the Wernerian Society, and Brewster's 

 and Jameson's Journals no less than forty papers on the geome- 

 trical and physical characters of minerals, including several newly dis- 

 covered and described for the first time by himself. In 1827 he joined 

 his brothers Eugen and Rudolph in the management of a flourishing 

 porcelain manufactory which they had established at Elbogen in Bohemia 

 in 1815; his eldest brother, Moritz, a lieutenant in the Austrian 

 army, had died in 1809 of wounds received at Landshut. For thirteen 

 years he took an active part in conducting the business of the porcelain 

 works, but not without maintaining an uninterrupted connexion with 

 Natural Science by making many communications to the Bohemian Aca- 

 demy of Science, PoggendorfT's * Annalen,' the ' Zeitschrift fiir Physik/ 

 edited by Baumgartner and v. Ettingshausen, and a periodical bearing the 

 same name edited by v. Ilolger ; and in 1829 he published a work en- 

 titled " Anfangsgrunde der Mineralogie." 



In April 1840 he was appointed to succeed Mohs (who died at Agordo 

 in the Venetian Alps on the 29th of the preceding September) as lecturer 

 on Mineralogy and Custodian of a newly formed collection of Minerals, 

 mainly the gift of Count Breunner, deposited in the Austrian Mint at 



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