Abstract
DR. N. L. BOWEN, of the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution, Washington, and sometime distinguished service professor of petrology in the University of Chicago, is one of the great pioneers in quantitative experimental petrology. Distinguished as physical chemist and petrologist, an experimenter of the first rank, his researches have been primarily devoted to the experimental field of silicate equilibria at high temperatures, and to the application of these and related studies to the fundamental problems of the igneous rocks. Some of his great contributions to petrogenesis—on the role of fractional crystallization in the evolution of igneous magma, the concept of the reaction series in the igneous melt and his critical assessment of magmatic assimilation processes—have been brilliantly developed in his "Evolution of the Igneous Rocks" (1928), a survey and synthesis which has exerted a greater influence on petrological thought than any other contribution in this field over many years. These, with his later studies, have made a deep impression in an ever widening field, not only in igneous and metamorphic petrology but also in the related study of silicate technology.
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Prof. N. L. Bowen. Nature 163, 793 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163793c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163793c0