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Back to article: JEAN ETIENNE GUETTARD (1715–1786)

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GUETTARD, JEAN ETIENNE (1715–1786), French naturalist and mineralogist, was born at Etampes, on the 22nd of September 1715. In boyhood he gained a knowledge of plants from his grandfather, who was an apothecary, and later he qualified as a doctor in medicine. Pursuing the study of botany in various parts of France and other countries, he began to take notice of the relation between the distribution of plants and the soils and subsoils. In this way his attention came to be directed to minerals and rocks. In 1746 he communicated to the Academy of Sciences in Paris a memoir on the distribution of minerals and` rocks, and this was accompanied by a map on which he had recorded his observations. He thus, as remarked by W. D. Conybeare, " first carried into execution the idea, proposed by [Martini Lister years before, of geological maps." In the course of his journeys he made a large collection of fossils and figured many of them, but he had no clear ideas about the sequence of strata. He made observations also on the degradation of
His publications include: Observations sur les plantes (2 vols., 1747); Histoire de la decouverte faite en France de matieres semblables a celles dont la porcelaine de la Chine est composee (1765); Memoires sur differentes parties des sciences et arts (5 vols., 1768—'783); Memoire sur la mineralogie du Dauphine (2 vols., 1779). See The Founders of Geology, by Sir A. Geikie (1897).