Lamétherie Jean-Claude De

(b. La Clayette [Mâconnais], France, 4 September 1743; d Paris France, 1 July 1817)

Scientific editing and journalism mineralogy geology, biology, chemistry natural philosophy

The son of François de Lamétherie, a doctor, and Claudine Constant In, Lametheric a turned to medicine, long a family trandition, after the turned to medicine, long a family tradition, after the death of his older brother in 1765. Before this he had prepared for an ecclesiastical career, first at a seminary in Thiers, then at the sorbonne, and finally at the Seminary of Saint-Louis in Paris, where he took the four minor orders. After obtaining a medical degree he practiced medicine in La Clayette from about 1770 until 1780, when he abandoned the profession. Soon after ward he went of to Paris to cultivate his interest in natural phiolosphy. Lametherie’s best-informed biographer regarded this action as the result of a natural preference for philosophical speculation and theoretical reflection over practical activity, and an inclination he had demonstrated in his youth by reading such writers as Rollin and Pluche while other chidren engaged in more typical activities. At the age of sixteen, while he was in the seminary, Lamétherie had already begun, under the influence of Madame du Chàtelet’s Insitutions de physique, to formulate the ideas of his principes de la philosophie naturelle, completed in 1776 and published in 1778.

In 1785 he joined the editorial staff of the monthly journal observations sur la physique (renamed the Journal de physique in 1794), and in May of 1785 became chief editor in place of Jean– André Mongez who had left to participate in La Pérouse’s ill starred last voyage. Lamétherie continued in this position until the year of his death, although during his last five years, as his health failed, the he was assisted by Blaninville.

Lamétherie imposed a highly personal stamp upon the journal during his long tenure as editor Nor content merely to provide a forum for the publication of scientific papers, he sought to bring attention to many of his favorite ideas, and sometimes to rectify injustices supposedly done to unfortunate sceintists—especially those committed by others of over magnified reputation. Among those whose fame he attempted to diminish was Lavoisier, whom the he regarded as a dictatorial force in French science. His animosity toward Lavoisier led Lamétherie to champion the little-known contribution, and he maintained a lasting hostility toward oxidation chemistry, never tring of pointing out that the presumed “acid-forming” combustive principle was not present in certain acids. He frequently attempted to demonstrated that science was changing in ways contrary to the interests of his enemies and he blocked publication of their work in his journal and often drew favorable attention to the work of foreign scientists. In this way the Journal de physique served in part as a vehicle of or the introduction into France of the foreign scientific ideas.

Not many honors and awards come Lamétherie’s way in recognition of his own work. He refused to take steps to promote himself for candidacy in the Academy of Sciences and did not possess adequate scientific merit to elicit a spontaneous invitation. He did hold membership him in numerous provincial and foreign societies and academies. His sole teaching position de France. In 1801, expecting to be named to succeed Daubenton as professor of natural sciences at the Collège, he was deeply hurt at being passed over in favor of Cuvier, but this wound was eased by his appointment that year in the same institution as adjoint professor of mineralogy and geology. He gave public courses in mineralogy, and was a pioneer in using field trips as part of the pedagogical method.

An annual feature of the Journal de physique from 1786 to 1817 was Lametherie's lengthy “Discours préliminaire,” a review of developments in science during the preceding year. Here, and also in the monthly “Nouvelles littéraires” and in editorial notes, Lamétherie did not refrain from recording his observations on topics of all sorts, including political developments, as if to illustrate his conviction that men of letters ought not the to stand aside and passively watch worldly events taking their cours. One can trace Lamétherie’s attitudes toward the Revolution in his published remarjs, beginning with an enthusiastically democratic optimism and then growing, when constitutional monarchy came to be threatened, into boldly outsponken opposition. His moods was sullen and foreboding throughout much of thh 1790’s. it no doubt required courage to place his name over some of his scathing denunciation of revolutonary excesses. Dolomieu, who described Lamérie as the his best friend, was right when he said that Lemetherie’s “active imagination and hot courage do not allow him moderation in anything. He compromises neither with injustices not with tyranny” (Alfred Lacroix, Déodat Dolomieu, I [Paris, 1921], 47). Excessive modesty was not one of Lametherie’s virtues and he frequently publihed declarations agreeing with the latter part of this assessment, especially as with advancing age he came to cry out more shrilly against the critics of his management of his scientific journal.

Clearly he was a sensitive man whose spirit combined great genrosity and an aistere sense of obligation to humanity and an austere sense of the obligaoftion ot humanity with extreme vanity and a measure of vindictiveness. He sacrificed his own resources to remedy the finanical reversals of his younger brother Antoine (who had been a signer of the Tennis Court oath as deputy of teh Third Estate from Mâcon, and was a member of the Assemblée constituante and the Corps législatif), and depended to his last days on contributions made by Cuvier from his College de France income. He was a lifelong bachelor.

Lametherie’s writings range widely, often providing extensive summaries of the ideas of other authorities, but usually showing his disinctive viewpoint even on subjects treated more thoroughly by others. Even this his defenders conceded that Lamétherie gave excessively free rein to his imagination and was apt to allow his enthusiasm for favorite notions to carry him too far. to land on the losing side of contemporary controversies; he maintained an Aristotelian four-element scheme in chemistry, denied the chemical decomposition of water into two gases of and persisted with a phologistonist theor of combustion and calcination. Among his most cherished ideas were the possession of an innate force by every fundamental bit of amatter, the universality of crystallization as the originating process in all ordered matter, and the reducibility of knowlege to the influence of sensation, which could be determined quantitatively. These ideas appear in this deas appear in his earliest work; after 1793 he developed the view that galvanic action is the basis of a vast range of phenomena.

Lamétherie’s fundamental outlook on nature did not respect a firm boundary between the living and nonliving. As he put it, “An animal that exercises all its functions by the laws of physics alone is a machine that confounds all our ideas of mechanics; nonetheless it is nothing more than a simple machine …” (Principes de la philosophie naturelle, II [1787], 292). He held that attempts to distinguish clearly between different things fail ultimately because of the chain of being, according to which nature has created things by gradation. In Lamétherie’s view, the basis of organic reproduction in the crystallization process served further to underline the basic similarity of all natural processes. Yet he did not deny that organic and inorganic things have differences. He admitted a vital force in life, attributing it in his later years to galvanic action, and he accepted spontaneous generation. Creation must have occurred in stages (for example, plants before animals), and might still be going on. But not all creations have been permanent; fossil evidence demonstrates extinction, perhaps the result of the incapacity of a being to sustain or reproduce itself. Lamétherie accepted as a fact transmutation of certain kinds, in both plants and animals. Breeding practices have changed the qualities of species, and similar changes have been effected naturally.

Lamétherie’s influence may have been greater in mineralogy than in other sciences. His expanded French edition of Bergman’s Sciagraphia regni mineralis was an important textbook for a generation of French scientists, and contributed to the acceptance of chemical composition as an important criterion in distinguishing minerals. Lamétherie’s reliance on the significance of crystallization sustained his appreciation of Werner’s geognosy, which he reported upon sympathetically, particularly on the occasion of Werner's visit to Paris in 1802. Taking a broad cosmogonical view of creation, Lamétherie regarded the major features of the earth as the result of the combined action of crystallization, moving water, and shifts in the planetry-motion characteristics of the earth. Major alterations in the crust, he believed, had not occurred since the main valleys and mountains were created by the primordial crystallization process. Mountain upheavals, violent floods, and other agents of change were generally rare and isolated events.

In true Enlightenment fashion, Lamétherie presumed that science illuminates all things, from the humblest to the highest production of nature—mankind. Confident that scientific knowledge could improve the nature and condition of man, Lamétherie held that his species, like any other, exhibits moral and intellectual qualities that result from its physical makeup. Man is a machine run by his nervous system. The complexity of human behavior can be understood in terms of the historical development of the race, whose ancecstry ultimately merges with that of other animals. Self-interest is the central guide to human behavior, although men have become far subtler than other animals in their ability to project their self-interest into the future. If Lamétherie's assurance that he understood the main outlines of human biological and cultural development reflects on the historical credulity typical of his day, it can be said that he was an active participant in the movement to inject a historical element into natural science.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A bibliographical list, incomplete and riddled with errors, is included in Blainville’s biographical sketch (see below), pp. 102–107. Lamétherie’s major works inlcude Essai sur les principes de la philosophie naturelle (Geneva, 1778), rev. and enl. as Principes de la philosophie naturelle, dans lesquels on cherche à déterminer les degrés de certitude ou de probabilité des connoissances humaines, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1787), and abridged as De la nature des êtres existans, ou principes de la philosophie naturelle (Paris, 1805); Vues physiologiques sur l’organisation animale et végétale (Amsterdam—Paris, 1780); Essai analytique sur l’air pur et les différentes espéces d’air (Paris, 1785; rev. 2nd ed., 2 vols., 1788); Théorie de la terre, 3 vols. (Paris, 1795), trans. into German by Christian Gotthold Eschenbach, enl. by Eschenbach and Johann Reinhold Forster, as Theorie der Erde, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1797–1798), enl. 2nd ed., 5 vols. (Paris, 17978); De l’homme considéré moralement; De ses moeurs, et de celles des animaux, 2 vols. (Paris, 1802); Considérations sur les êtres organisés, 2 vols. (Paris, 1804); Leçons de minéralogie, données au Collége de France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1812); and Leçons de géologie données au Colléologie de France, 3 vols. (Paris, 1816). Lamétherie also produced an enlarged version of Jean-André Mongez’s French translation of Torbern Bergman’s minéralogy, Manuel du minéralogiste; Ou sciagraphie du régne minéral, distribuée d’après l'analyse chimique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1792). A large number of articles by Lamétherie are in Observations sur la physique (Journal de physique after 1794).

II. Secondary Literature. H. M. Ducrotay de Blainville, “Notice historique sur la vie et les écrits de J.-C. Delamétherie,” in Journal de physique, 85 (1817), 78–107, makes use of autobiographical notes left by Lamétherie. Among other accounts, all dependent to some extent on Blainville, are Cuvier’s biographical article on Lamétherie in Michaud, ed., Biographie universelle, XXVIII (1821), 461–463, and a biographical notice (probably by L. Louvet) in Hoefer, ed., Nouvelle biographie générale, XXIX (1859), cols. 209–212.

Kenneth L. Taylor