Alexandre Brongniart Facts
Alexandre Brongniart Facts
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| Interesting Alexandre Brongniart Facts: |
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| Brongniart attended both the École des Mines and the École de Médecine in Paris before finishing school and working for his uncle, a chemist. |
| He later served in the military, then accepted a position as a professor of natural history. |
| As a zoologist with a fascination with prehistoric animals, Brongniart studied fossilized trilobites in the Paris Basin, using their layers of deposit to help form the basis for geological dating. |
| While working as a naturalist, he was also the first to divide the class Reptilia into four distinct orders, one of which was later repositioned as the Amphibians. |
| Brongniart's new classification for reptiles included the orders Batrachia (this is the one that is now a separate class, Amphibia), Chelonia, Ophidia, and Sauria. |
| His pioneering work in geological classification and strata dating demonstrated that the city of Paris had been covered in both saltwater and freshwater at different times in the Earth's history. |
| As a chemist, a mineralogist, and a zoologist, Brongniart brought those three aspects together as the appointed head of the French ceramics institute. |
| At the age of thirty after serving as professor at Paris' École de Mines (Mining School), he was appointed in 1800 by Napoleon's minister of the interior to be the director of the once-defunct ceramics manufactory, the Sèvres Porcelain Factory, based on his background in minerology. |
| Brongniart held the position for forty-seven years, despite different changes in administration over the French government. |
| Not content only to direct the production of porcelain and ceramics, he founded the Musée national de Céramique-Sèvres (National Museum of Ceramics) to preserve both the scientific understanding and the artistry of the medium. |
| Brongniart is remembered for an extensive collection of treatises and writings on his key fields of study, mostly minerology and natural history. |
| He is the father of noted botanist Adolphe-ThéodoreBrongniart. |
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