Alfred Des Cloizeaux

Alfred Des Cloizeaux

Alfred Louis Olivier Legrand Des Cloizeaux (17 October 1817Template:Snd6 May 1897) was a French mineralogist.

Des Cloizeaux was born at Beauvais, in the department of Oise. He studied with Jean-Baptiste Biot at the Collège de France. He became professor of mineralogy at the École Normale Supérieure and afterwards at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. He studied the geysers of Iceland, and wrote also on the classification of some of the eruptive rocks.<ref name="EB1911">{{#if: |

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His main work consisted in the systematic examination of the crystals of numerous minerals, in researches on their optical properties and on the subject of light polarization.<ref name="EB1911"/> He demonstrated the circular polarization of cinnabar.<ref name=NI>The New international encyclopaedia, Volume 6 edited by Frank Moore Colby, Talcott Williams</ref>

He wrote especially on the means of determining the different feldspars,<ref name="EB1911"/> and is credited with the discovery of microcline (a triclinic potash-feldspar).<ref name=NI/> He named the minerals montebrasite (1871), binnite (a variety of tennantite) and Christianite (in honor of Christian VIII of Denmark).<ref>Mindat.org Montebrasite</ref><ref>Mindat.org Binnite (of Des Cloizeaux)</ref><ref>Mindat.org Christianite (of Des Cloizeaux)</ref> In 1854, Alexis Damour dedicated the mineral descloizite in honor of Des Cloizeaux.<ref>Mindat.org Descloizite</ref>

Des Cloizeaux was elected as a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1869, and was its President in 1889. He was awarded the Wollaston Medal by the Geological Society of London in 1886.<ref>Google Books The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London</ref> He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1878.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> His best-known books are Leçons de cristallographie (1861) and Manuel de minéralogie (2 vols., Paris, 1862, 1874 and 1893).<ref name="EB1911"/>

See also

• Physical crystallography before X-rays

External links

• Alfred L.O.L. Des Cloizeaux - The Mineralogical Record - Library