fossils & minerals
Georg Hieronymus Welsch (or Welschius) was a German physician, translator and writer.
He studied medicine in Tübingen, Strasbourg and Padua. Having lost the ability to speak as a result of illness, he decided to settle in Augsburg and educate himself. Welsch studied Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic. Then in Italy he visited numerous libraries, including the Vatican library, and collected books, including the Turkish calendar.
Georg Welsch wrote several books on medicine and fossil curiosities, and researched texts on astronomy and medicine from the Ottoman Empire. He is best known for his translation of the calendar of Avicenna and Sheikh Abul-Wafa. Welsch was also a member of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum.
Heinrich Jacob Sivers was a German Evangelical Lutheran theologian and scholar, poet and writer, naturalist and collector.
Sifers studied law and theology at the University of Kiel, and received his doctorate at the University of Rostock, where he lectured and wrote various works. He wrote many poems, sermons and ceremonial speeches in German, Swedish and Latin.
Heinrich Sivers also studied geology, traveled extensively in Scandinavia, and compiled his own mineral collection. In 1737 he sold many of his minerals, as well as a cabinet of Roman coins to Count Carl Gillenborg, today they can be seen at Lund University.
Bernard Palissy was a French natural scientist, painter, ceramicist and sculptor, geologist and writer of the French Renaissance.
Born into a family of artisans, Palissy apprenticed with his father as a glass artist and traveled throughout southwestern France comprehending pottery and studying geology. Today he is best known for his amazing lead-glazed pottery with images of various animals and people. After seeing a white glazed cup, probably of Chinese porcelain, in the 1540s, he set out to learn the secrets of its manufacture. His early research is described in De l'art de la terre. Although Palissy never succeeded in reproducing what he saw, his experiments gave him a thorough knowledge of the chemical compositions of minerals.
From 1575 in Paris, Palissy gave public lectures on natural history, which were published as Discours admirables (1580). In this treatise, Bernard Palissy touches on an incredibly wide range of subjects, from the techniques of ceramics, metallurgy and chemistry to hydrology, geology and fossils. He correctly identified fossils as the remains of ancient life. This work reveals him as a writer and scientist, a creator of modern agronomy and a pioneer of the experimental method, with scientific views generally more advanced than those of his contemporaries.
