Dolomieu, Dieudonné

Dieudonné Dolomieu, also called Déodat De Gratet De Dolomieu, (born June 23, 1750, Dolomieu, near Tour-du-Pin, Fr.—died Nov. 26, 1801, Château-Neuf, Saône-et-Loire), French geologist and mineralogist after whom the mineral dolomite was named.

A member of the order of Malta since infancy, he was sentenced to death in his 19th year for killing a brother knight in a duel but was pardoned. He continued to study natural sciences, which he had begun earlier, and after giving up his commission as a carabineer, visited Spain, Sicily, the Pyrenees, and the Calabria region of southern Italy. Following a study of the Alps (1789–90), he described dolomite (1791). A member of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt (1798), he was captured on the way home and imprisoned at Messina. During his imprisonment he wrote his main treatise, Sur la philosophie minéralogique et sur l’espèce minérale (1801; “On Mineralogical Philosophy and on the Mineral Class”), on the margins of a Bible.