Abstract
BY the death of Prof. A. Favre, Switzerland has been deprived of one of her foremost men of science, and geology has lost a very assiduous and successful cultivator. His death appears to sever the last remaining link between the present generation of Swiss geologists and that older and famous one which included Bernhard Studer, Arnold Escher von der Linth, Peter Merian, and Oswald Heer. The late Prof. Favre, who had reached the age of seventy-seven at the time of his death, was the author of numerous papers, the earliest of which, βOn the Anthracites of the Alps,β was published as long ago as 1841. He will perhaps be best remembered by the part he took in the famous controversy concerning the supposed admixture of fossils, belonging to different geological horizons, which were said to occur in the same beds in the Alps. In opposition to M. Scipion Gras and others who asserted that such intermixture of fossils did actually occur, Favre was able to show, by a series of patient investigations, that the apparent reversals of succession, and intimate union of Carboniferous, Jurassic, and Tertiary strata, could all be accounted for by repeated interfoldings and complicated overthrust faults. It is interesting to note that at the time when Favre was thus successfully contending for such an interpretation of supposed anomalies in the Alpine rocks, James Nicol in this country was engaged in a precisely similar controversy with Murchison and his followers, concerning the rocks of our own Highlands. But whereas the triumph of Favre's views was immediate and complete, and their author lived to see the justice of his interpretation universally admitted, Nicol was fated to witness the influence of great authority exerted for a long time in preventing the truth of his conclusions from being accepted; and only after his death was the retraction made which showed how much Scotland owes to this able interpreter of the geological structure of his native land. History may be relied upon, however, to do equal justice to the successful Swiss geologist and the disappointed Scotch one. Prof. Favre, besides papers on a great variety of geological questions, wrote several works dealing with the geology of the parts of Savoy, Piedmont, and Switzerland of which Mont Blanc forms the centre. During the later years of his life he had retired from his Professorship of Geology at Geneva, but up to the time of his death Favre held the post of President of the Federal Commission having charge of the geological map of Switzerland, As long ago as 1874 he was elected a foreign member of the Geological Society, and he was also a correspondent of the Institute of France.
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Alphonse Favre. Nature 42, 299 (1890). https://doi.org/10.1038/042299a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/042299a0