Ami Boue

Ami Boue was a geologist and naturalist born March 16, 1794, in Hamburg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, of French Huguenot descent, who died November 21, 1881, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, and who earned his medical doctorate at the University of Edinburgh in 1817 studying under Robert Jameson before conducting geological expeditions across Scotland, Germany, Austria and southern Europe. He co-founded the Societe Geologique de France in 1830 and served as its president in 1835, settled in Vienna in 1841 where he became a naturalized Austrian subject and communicated important papers on Balkan geology to the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and published pioneering ethnological and geological maps of the region. His works include Essai geologique sur l Ecosse in 1820, Guide du Geologue-Voyageur in 1836, and La Turquie d Europe in 1840, and he argued against catastrophism in favor of gradual uniformitarian change. He received the Wollaston Medal in 1847.