Carl Christian Ochsenius (9 March 1830 – 9 December 1906) was a German geologist and mining engineer who worked extensively in South America. He came with the "bar theory" to explain the pattern of salt and

gypsum Gypsum is a soft sulfate mineral composed of calcium sulfate dihydrate, with the chemical formula . It is widely mined and is used as a fertilizer and as the main constituent in many forms of plaster, blackboard or sidewalk chalk, and dr ...

deposits.

Biography

Ochsenius was born in

Kassel Kassel (; in Germany, spelled Cassel until 1926) is a city on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Regierungsbezirk Kassel and the district of the same name and had 201,048 inhabitants in December 2 ...

where his father worked in the court. Educated at the Gymnasium he joined the Polytechnic to study mining and geology. Recommended by

Robert Bunsen Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (; 30 March 1811 – 16 August 1899) was a German chemist. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and discovered caesium (in 1860) and rubidium (in 1861) with the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff. The Bu ...

, he joined an expedition to Chile in 1851 with Rudolf Amandus Philippi and stayed on there to study mineral deposits. He worked in Chile until 1869. He also collected natural history specimens in this period and several species have been named after him including the beetle ''

Ceroglossus ochsenii ''Ceroglossus suturalis'' is a species of beetle Beetles are insects that form the order Coleoptera (), in the superorder Endopterygota. Their front pair of wings are hardened into wing-cases, elytra, distinguishing them from most other ...

'' and the plant ''

Abutilon ochsenii ''Abutilon'' is a large genus of flowering plants in the mallow family, Malvaceae. It is distributed throughout the tropics and subtropics University of Marburg The Philipps University of Marburg (german: Philipps-Universität Marburg) was founded in 1527 by Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, which makes it one of Germany's oldest universities and the oldest still operating Protestant university in the worl ...

in 1884.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ochsenius, Carl 1830 births 1905 deaths 19th-century German geologists