VII. OBITUARY.--Achille Delesse, eminent as geologist and mineralogist

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ACHILLE DELESSE.


The death of this distinguished man must be recorded. An interesting
_resume_ of his labors by M. Daubree has appeared, from which we take
the following facts. After a training in his native town at the Lyceum
of Metz, which furnished so many scholars to the Polytechnic school,
Delesse was admitted at the age of twenty to this school. In 1839 he
left to enter the Corps des Mines. From the beginning of his career the
student engineer applied himself with ardor to the sciences to which
he was to devote his entire existence. The journeys which he undertook
then, and continued later, in France, Germany, Poland, England, and
Ireland, helped to confirm and develop the bent of his mind. He soon
arrived at important scientific results, and was rewarded, in 1845, by
having conferred to him by the university the course of mineralogy and
geology in the Faculty at Besancon, where Delesse at the same time
fulfilled the duties of engineer of mines. Five years later he returned
to Paris, where he continued his university duties, at first as deputy
of the course of geology at the Sorbonne, then as master of the
conferences at the Superior Normal School. Besides this, he continued
his profession of engineer of mines as inspector of the roads of Paris.
The first original researches of the young _savant_ concern pure
mineralogy; he studied a certain number of species, of which the