I.—Eminent Living Geologists

Extract

The recent retirement of Professor Albert Jean Gaudry, who for fifty years has been associated with the Jardin des Plantes, gives us an opportunity of presenting our readers with his portrait.

Born in 1827, he started for Cyprus and Greece at the age of 25, on what was destined to prove an epoch-making visit, for while there he obtained satisfactory information about the rich deposit of vertebrata at Pikermi, which he afterwards visited. The results of his labours are embodied in the classic “Animaux fossiles et Géologie de l'Attique” (1862–67), and a new world of vertebrate life was fully opened to zoologists, of which the first glimpse had been obtained by Wagner. But perhaps the best known of Gaudry's writings is his “Enchainements du monde animal dans les temps géologiques” (1878), reprinted in 1895, a work which has had great influence on the younger school of thought (see Geol. Mag., 1878, pp. 221–227, and 1884, pp. 32–40).

Appointed Assistant to Professor Alcide d'Orbigny (the first to hold the Chair of Palaeontology at the Jardin des Plantes) in 1853, while still in Cyprus, he succeeded Edouard Lartet in that Chair in 1872. He was Vice-Secretary of the Geological Society of France in 1852, Secretary in 1854, and President in 1863, 1878, and 1887; while in 1900 he presided over the Meetings of the Eighth International Congress of Geology, held in Paris.

Gaudry's first published works dealt with Starfishes (1852) and the Origin of Flint (1852), but soon afterwards he confined himself to Vertebrate Palaeozoology, with a result that is known to even the most superficial student of the science throughout the world.