Louis-Constant Prévost was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 geologist

Geologist

A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth as well as the processes and history that has shaped it. Geologists usually engage in studying geology. Geologists, studying more of an applied science than a theoretical one, must approach Geology using...

.

He was the son of the tax farmer Louis Prévost, receiver of the rentes of Paris. He was educated there at the Central Schools, where, inspired by the lectures of Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier

Georges Chrétien Léopold Dagobert Cuvier or Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist...

, his particular mentor Alexandre Brongniart

Alexandre Brongniart

Alexandre Brongniart was a French chemist, mineralogist, and zoologist, who collaborated with Georges Cuvier on a study of the geology of the region around Paris...

, and André Marie Constant Duméril

André Marie Constant Duméril

André Marie Constant Duméril was a French zoologist. He was professor of anatomy at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle from 1801 to 1812, when he became professor of herpetology and ichthyology...

, he determined to devote himself to natural science. He took his degree in Letters and Sciences in 1811, and for a time pursued the study of medicine and anatomy.

Mainly through the influence of Brongniart he turned his attention to geology

Geology

Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...

. During the years 1816-1819 he took advantage of the necessity of accompanying his associate Philippe de Girard, who was seekling out a site for establishing a textile mill near Vienna, by making a special study of the Viennese Basin, where he pointed out for the first time the presence of Tertiary

Tertiary

The Tertiary is a deprecated term for a geologic period 65 million to 2.6 million years ago. The Tertiary covered the time span between the superseded Secondary period and the Quaternary...

 strata like those of the Paris Basin

Paris Basin (geology)

The Paris Basin is one of the major geological regions of France having developed since the Triassic on a basement formed by the Variscan orogeny.-Extent:...

, but which included a series of later date. His next work (1821) was an essay on the geology of parts of Normandy

Normandy

Normandy is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. It is in France.The continental territory covers 30,627 km² and forms the preponderant part of Normandy and roughly 5% of the territory of France. It is divided for administrative purposes into two régions:...

, with special reference to the "Secondary"—or Mesozoic

Mesozoic

The Mesozoic era is an interval of geological time from about 250 million years ago to about 65 million years ago. It is often referred to as the age of reptiles because reptiles, namely dinosaurs, were the dominant terrestrial and marine vertebrates of the time...

— strata, which he compared with those of southern England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

; in this he had the collaboration of Charles Lyell

Charles Lyell

Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, Kt FRS was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by slow-moving forces still in operation...

.

From 1821-1829 he was professor of geology at the Athenaeum at Paris, and he took a leading part with Ami Boue

Ami Boué

Ami Boué , Austrian geologist, was born at Hamburg, and received his early education there and in Geneva and Paris....

, Gérard Paul Deshayes

Gérard Paul Deshayes

Gérard Paul Deshayes was a French geologist and conchologist.He was born in Nancy, his father at that time being professor of experimental physics in the École Centrale of the Meurthe département....

 and Jules Desnoyers

Jules Desnoyers

Jules Pierre François Stanislaus Desnoyers was a French geologist and archaeologist.-Life:Desnoyers was born at Nogent-le-Rotrou, in the department of Eure-et-Loir. Becoming interested in geology at an early age, he was one of the founders of the Geological Society of France in 1830...

 in the founding of the Société géologique de France

Société géologique de France

The Société géologique de France is a French learned society founded on 17 March 1830. As of 2006, it counts 1,200 members....

 (1830). In 1831 he became assistant professor and afterwards honorary professor of geology to the faculty of sciences of the Sorbonne

Sorbonne

The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...

. He was on hand with an artist to witness the undersea volcano that produced Ferdinandea

Ferdinandea

Ferdinandea is a submerged volcanic island which forms part of the underwater volcano Empedocles, south of Sicily, and which is one of a number of submarine volcanoes known as the Campi Flegrei del Mar di Sicilia. Currently a seamount, eruptions have raised it above sea level several times...

 (now Graham Bank) off the south coast of Sicily that July; he named it Île Julia, for its July appearance, and reported in the Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France In 1848 he was elected to his late mentor Brogniart's seat in the Académie des sciences

Having studied the volcano

Volcano

2. Bedrock3. Conduit 4. Base5. Sill6. Dike7. Layers of ash emitted by the volcano8. Flank| 9. Layers of lava emitted by the volcano10. Throat11. Parasitic cone12. Lava flow13. Vent14. Crater15...

es of Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 and Auvergne

Auvergne (province)

Auvergne was a historic province in south central France. It was originally the feudal domain of the Counts of Auvergne. It is now the geographical and cultural area that corresponds to the former province....

, he opposed the views of Christian Leopold von Buch

Christian Leopold von Buch

Christian Leopold Freiherr von Buch was a German geologist and paleontologist born in Stolpe an der Oder and is remembered as one of the most important contributors to geology in the first half of the nineteenth century...

 regarding craters of elevation, maintaining that the cones were due to the material successively erupted. Like Lyell he advocated a study of the slow and incessant forces in action at present, in order to illustrate the past, the principle in geology called uniformitarianism

Uniformitarianism

In the philosophy of naturalism, the uniformitarianism assumption is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the...

, discounting catastrophic events

Catastrophism

Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of modern geology is uniformitarianism , in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance...

. One of his more important memoirs was De la Chronologie des terrains et du synchronisme des formations (1845), in which he expounded the principle of the synchronicity of successive stages of igneous and sedimentary deposition across wide terrains. His most general titles were Documents pour l'histoire des terrains tertiaires (Paris, 1827) and his Traité de géographie physique co-authored with E. Bassano (Paris, 1836).