Ferdinand Zirkel

Ferdinand Zirkel was a German geologist born May 20, 1838, in Bonn, Prussia, who died June 11, 1912, in Bonn, and who moved from early studies of mining into pioneering work in microscopical petrography, then a comparatively new science, after travels to Iceland, Scotland and England that included a meeting with Henry Clifton Sorby. He published the influential Lehrbuch der Petrographie in 1866, with further editions in 1893 and 1894, and Microscopical Petrography in 1876, and held professorships at the University of Lemberg from 1863, the University of Kiel from 1868, and the University of Leipzig from 1870 as professor of mineralogy and geology, retiring in 1909. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society, received an honorary doctorate of science from Oxford, received the Wollaston Medal in 1898, and is commemorated in the naming of Mount Zirkel in Colorado, the mineral zirkelite and the lunar feature Dorsum Zirkel.