Adolphe d'Archiac

Etienne Jules Adolphe Desmier de Saint-Simon, Vicomte d Archiac, known as Adolphe d Archiac, was a French geologist and palaeontologist born September 24, 1802, in Reims, France, who died December 24, 1868, in Paris by drowning in the Seine, and who trained at the military school of Saint-Cyr and served nine years as a cavalry officer before retiring in 1830 to pursue geology, publishing his first scientific works from 1835 on Tertiary and Cretaceous formations before turning to Carboniferous, Devonian and Silurian strata. His principal work, the eight volume Histoire des progres de la geologie de 1834 a 1859, published between 1847 and 1860, is considered his magnum opus, and he later published the three volume Paleontologie stratigraphique between 1864 and 1865. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1857 and appointed professor of palaeontology at the Museum National d Histoire Naturelle in Paris in 1861. He received the Wollaston Medal in 1853 jointly with Edouard de Verneuil.