Abstract
ON August 21 and 22 respectively occurred the centenary of the death of one distinguished Frenchman and the bicentenary of the birth of another. The first of these men is the eminent geologist and civil engineer Jean François d'Aubuisson de Voisins, who was born in the South of France on April 16, 1769, and died at the age of seventy–two on August 21, 1841. For four years D'Aubuisson was a student under Werner at the Mining School at Freiburg, and it was while in Germany that he studied the basalts of Saxony, an essay on which he published in Paris in 1803. This essay, in which the Wernerian doctrines were adopted, was reported on by Haüy and Ramond, who advised the author to inspect the basalts of Auvergne. This D'Aubuisson immediately did, with the result that in a paper “Sur les volcans et les basaltes de l'Auvergne”, read to the French Institute in 1804, he abandoned many of the views he had hitherto held. “The facts which I saw”, he wrote, “spoke too plainly to be mistaken; the truth revealed itself too clearly before my eyes, so that I must either have absolutely refused the testimony of my senses in not seeing the truth, or that of my conscience in not straightway making it known.” D'Aubuisson's most important work was his “Traité de Géognosie”, published in 1819, but he was also known for his investigation in hydraulics (1826–30) and his “Traité d'Hydraulique, á l'usage des Ingénieurs”, an enlarged edition of which, published in 1840, was translated into English by Bennett and published at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1852.
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Two Notable French Men of Science. Nature 148, 253 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148253b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148253b0