Cotta, Carl Bernhard von

(b. Zillbach, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach [now German Democratic Republic], 24 October 1808; d. Freiberg, Saxony, [now German Democratic Republic], 14 September 1879)

geology.

Cotta was not only an important geologist in his own time but also, due to his synthesizing abilities, in later eras; he was rightly called the philosopher of geology in a time of increasingly detailed research.

The son of Heinrich cotta, founder of the Tharandt Forestry Academy near Dresden, and of Christiane Ortmann, Cotta spent his youth (from 1811) in Tharandt, where he attended the local elementary school and received private instruction. From 1822 to 1826 he attended the humanist Gymnasium of the Holy Cross ad Dresden. He also received private instruction in mathematics at Dresden from 1826 to 1827 and enrolled at his father’s school for the summer semester of 1827. At the same time his father sought his son’s admission to the Freiberg Bergakademic. This, the oldest mining school in Europe, had been made famous by Wener.

Cotta enrolled at the Freiberg Bergakademie in 1827. His teachers included such well-known scholars as the mineralogist F. A. Breithaupt, the physicist Ferdinand Reich, the chemist W.A. Lampadius, and the neptunist geognost K.A. Kühn. After completing his studies in 1831, Cotta spent half a year in the mines and foundries of the Erzgebirge before moving to Heidelberg. There he studied under the volcanist K.C. von Leonhard and graduated at the end of 1832 with the dissertation Die Dendrolithen in Beziehung auf ihren inneren Bau, a landmark in the description of the silicified Permian timber of Saxony.

Upon his return to Tharandt, Cotta found employment at the forestry academy. In 1833, however, he agreed to participate in the geological survey of Saxony directed by K.F. Naumann. Cotta mapped a large part of the region, primarily in western Saxony and Lusatia. When this major undertaking was completed in 1845, the critics wrote that this map must be considered “probably the best map of its kind done to date.” At the same time the old controversy between the neptunists (followers of Werner) and the volcanists (with L. von Buch as principal representative) over the Lusatia overthrust flared up once again. With a masterful, methodical analysis Cotta clarified the situation and proved that neither theory was correct; rather, the granites and syenites had been thrust above the Cretaceous strata long after their solidification.

In 1839 Cotta received a permanent position at the Tharandt Forestry Academy and became its secretary in the autumn of 1840. When his friend Naumann was called to the University of Leipzig, Cotta succeeded him in 1842 as professor of geognosy and paleontology at the Freiberg Bergakademie. He taught there for thirty-two years, holding his professorship longer than all his predecessors and successors.

Outwardly, Cotta’s life after 1842 was without any particular ups and downs. Neither the 1849 revolution in Saxony (he was an active participant), nor the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, nor the Franco-Prussian War altered his position and his duties. Neither the industrialization of Germany nor the conditions at the Bergakademie itself had any major effect on his work.

Cotta’s principal efforts were devoted to teaching and research at Freiberg. Aware of the Wernerian heritage, during his many years of teaching he developed a far-reaching geological system. From 1842 he lectured on geognosy, from 1843 on paleontology, and in 1851 he introduced a course in ore deposits. This was probably the first course on this subject anywhere. Among Cotta’s students were A. W. Stelzner, C. H. Müller (the “Gang-Müller” of Freiberg), W. Vogelsang, R. Pumpelly, and S. F. Emmons.

Cotta traveled extensively. He was in the Alps and northern Italy in 1843, in Switzerland in 1849, in Bukovina (now divided between Rumania and the U. S. S.R.) in 1854, again in the Alps in 1857 and 1858, in Hungary in 1861, in the Altai in 1868 at the invitation of the Russian czar, and in 1869 in the coal district of southern Russia on the Don. He wrote reports on all trips, some as articles and some as separate works.

Cotta was a founder member of the German Geological Society in December 1848, an honorary member of the Natural science society Isis, Dresden, and a member of the Geological Society of London and of the Bergmännische Verein of Freiberg. Verein of Freiberg. For the special mapping of Thuringia, done completely on his own during his vacations in 1844–1847, the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar decorated him. He was appointed royal Saxon mining adviser and chief mining adviser in 1862, and from 1869 to 1874 he was a member of the board of trustees, and then of the senate, of the Bergakademie.

In the interval between Werner’s formulation of petrography (1787) and Sorby’s introduction of petrographical microscopy (1858), Cotta’s petrography represented the culmination and end of Werner’s macroscopic descriptive petrography. Cotta contributed numerous observations that led to the definition of new rocks, such as porphyrite, felsite, and banatite. He also emphasized the genesis of minerals; and thus his ideas on alkali and lime during metamorphosis, on ultrametamorphism, palingenesis, and hybrid granites (1855) sound quite moder. Cotta attempted to devise a genetic system of petrography, which received its final form in 1866; the principal groupings are still in use. It was broken down into sediments (mechanical, chemical, organogenetic), metamorphites, and magmatites (acid plutonic and volcanic, basic plutonic and volcanic).

Cotta is regarded as an originator of the science of ore deposits. In the series Gangstudien (1850–1862) he and his students dealt with special topics in that science. Cotta summarized the practical experience gained through his numerous travels and his reading in Die Lehre von den Erzlagerstätten (1855). A “Freiberg school” based on Cotta’s textbooks became active and later achieved worldwide fame. The degree to which Cotta extented the science of ore deposits from Saxony to the rest of the world was also reflected in the mineral collection at the Freiberg Bergakademie. His science of ore deposits contributed to the fame of the school, which lasted beyond his lifetime.

Cotta was always keenly interested in popularizing scientific findings. At the request of Weigel, a Leipzig publisher, he wrote a commentary (1848–1852) on Kosmos, the brilliant work by Alexander von Humboldt. Between 1852 and 1876 his Geologischen Bilder appeared in six editions.

His deliberate concern with philosophy distinguished Cotta from most of his colleagues. He was committed to the empirical study of nature and regarded the world as knowable, but believed that man’s abilities were insufficient for a complete understanding of the world. In his philosophical work Geologie der Gegenwart (1866) he defended certain spontaneous materialistic views. He should not be counted among the materialists, however, for he explained natural law by his concept of God and confined the task of natural science to the exploration of the material world, for which he assumed a comprehensive causal relationship. This outlook places Cotta between Humboldt and Darwin.

Cotta was an ardent defender of the concept of evolution even in the inorganic realm. Thus he defended Lyell’s principle of uniformitarianism but took issue with its inherent claim that the history of the earth was merely fluctuation of eternally equal forces, pointing out the earth’s historical development. In the twentieth century Hans Stille revived Cotta’s concepts and raised them to a new level by connecting Cotta’s continuous, but always new and differently determined, variability by means of a tectonic earth history divided into phases. Thus Cotta became the forerunner of Darwin in Germany and, as early as 1848 (eighteen years before Haeckel), expressed the basic biogenetic law.

He retired in 1874 for reasons of health; he suffered a stroke in 1877 and died two years later. Cotta is buried in the cemetery of Donat, as are many famous geologists.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A bibliography of all Cotta’s works is in Wagenbreth’s “Bernhard von Cotta” (see below), pp. 79–119.

His books are Die Dendrolithen in Beziehung auf ihren inneren Bau (Dresden-Leipzig, 1832; 2nd ed., 1850); Geologisches Glaubensbekenntnis (Dresden, 1835); Tharandt and seine Umgebung (Dresden-Leipzig, 1835); Geognostische Spezialkarte des Königreiches Sachsen, 3 vols. (Dresden-Leipzig, 1836–1845), done with K. F. Naumann; Geognostische Wanderungen (Dresden-Leipzig, 1836–1838); Über Thierfährten im bunten Sandstein (Dresden-Leipzig, 1839); Anleitung zum Studium der Geognosie (Dresden-Leipzig, 1842; 2nd ed., 1846; 3rd ed., 1849; 4th ed., 1852); GeognostischeKote von Thüringen 4 vols. (Dresden-Leipzig, 1844–1847); Winke über Aufsuchen von Braun- and Stein kohlen (Friberg, 1846; 2nd ed., 1850); Briefe über A. von Humbolders Kosmos, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1848–1852; 2nd ed., 1849; 3rd ed., 1855); also trans. into Russian (Moscow, 1850–1853); Die Bergademie zu Freiberg (Freiberg 1849); the series Gangstudies (Feriberg, 1850–1862); Geognostische Karten unseres Jarthunderts (Ferberig 1850); Der innere Bau der Gebirge (Ferberg, 1851); Geologiscal Bilder (Leipzig 1852; and 2nd ed., 1854 3rd ed., 1856 4th ed., 1861; 5th ed., 1871; 6th ed., 1876); Deutschlands Boden (Leibzig 1854 2nd ed., 1858) Die Gesteinslehere (Leipzig, 1855, 2nd ed., 1862 3rd and 4th eds., entitled Rocks Classified and Described, London 1866 and 1878); Die Lehre von den Erzlagerstatten (Freiberg, 1855; 2nd ed,. 1859–1861; 3rd ed., entitled A Treatise on Ore Deposits, New York, 1870); Die Lehre von den Flözformation (Fregie 1856); Geologische Fragen (Freiberg 1858); Katechismus der Geologie (Leipzig, 1861; 3rd., ed 1877); Die Geologie der Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1866; 2nd ed., 1867; 3rd ed., 1872 4th ed., 1874; 5th ed., 1878); Über des Entwicklungsgesetz der Erde (Leipzig, 1867) Der Altlai (Leeipizg 1871) and Beiträge zur Geschichte der Geologie (Leipzip, 1877).

Cotta also published 101 articles in Neues Jahrbuch fur Mineralogie six article in Zeitschrift der Deutschen geologischen Gesellschaft, 170 article in the Berg and huttenmännischen Zeitung Freiberg.

II. Secondary Literature. A modern, detailed biography of Cotta has been published only recently. It and other biographies, listed chronologically, are A. W. Stelzner, “Bernhard von Cotta gest.,” in Neues Jahrbuch für Mineralogie (1879); G. Pethö, “Cotta emlékezete in Földtani közlöny (Budapest)(1880), 90–97; H. C. Sorby, “Obituary,” in Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London (1880); Poggendorff, III(1898), 303; A von Zittel, “Bernhard von Cotte” in Allgemein deutsche Biographie XLVII(1903), 538, which is inaccurate; O. Marschall. “Bernhard von Cotta” in Handwörterbuch Naturwissenschaften II (Jena, 1921), 737; K. Lambrecht, W. Quenstedt, “Cotte,” in Paläntologi catalogus bio-bibliographcius. Fossilium catalogus (s’ Gravenhage, 1938); E. Krenkel. “Carl Berhard von Cotta, in Neue deutsche Biogrphie, III (Berlin, 1957), 318; O. Wagenbreth. “Bernhard von Cotta,” in Neue deutsche Biographie, III (Berlin, 1957), 381; O. Wagenbreth, “Bernhard von Cotta;” in Freiberger Forschungsheft, D36 (1965), with complete bibilography; and Berhard von Cotta. Seingeologiches and philosophiches Lebenswerk an Hand ausgewählter Zitate, Berichte Geogische Gesellschaft DDR Sounderhelf no. 3(Berlin, 1965)

Hans Prescher