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Jean-Claude Delamétherie

French naturalist, mineralogist, geologist and paleontologist (1743-1817)

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 16, 2025
Entity authorityQ653453 ↗
Source-derived summary

Jean-Claude Delamétherie (also de La Métherie, de Lamétherie, 4 September 1743 – 1 July 1817) was a French mineralogist, geologist and paleontologist.

Career

Delamétherie was born in La Clayette. He edited Journal de physique, de chimie, d'histoire naturelle et des arts from 1785. He was elected member of Leopoldina in 1792. He was a supporter of the French Revolution, but opposed to the Jacobins, and was forced to leave Paris during the Reign of Terror, interrupting publication of the Journal de physique until 1797.

Numerous minerals were first systematically described by Delamétherie.

In 1795, Delamétherie first described the Lherzolite (which he named after the site of its discovery, Étang de Lers in the Pyrenees).

Delamétherie was an advocate of transmutation of species. He was an atheist and materialist. Delamétherie held similar views to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck but differed on his views on the history of earth.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Jean-Claude Delamétherie” is french naturalist, mineralogist, geologist and paleontologist (1743-1817). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Jean-Claude, Delamétherie and French, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1743, 1817, 1785, 1792—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1743-09-04. For this dossier, Jean-Claude, Delamétherie and French is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “french naturalist, mineralogist, geologist and paleontologist (1743-1817)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q653453. VIAF identifies the subject as 79028885. The Library of Congress control number is n84102385. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1743, 1817, 1785 and 1792.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Jean-Claude Delamétherie” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.