Background
Cotta was born on October 24, 1808, in a forester's lodge, in Zillbach, Germany, the son of Heinrich von Cotta, founder of the Tharandt Forestry Academy near Dresden, and of Christiane Ortmann.
1866
Bernhard von Cotta, in 1866
Akademiestraße 6, 09599 Freiberg, Germany
Cotta enrolled at the Freiberg Bergakademie (now Freiberg University of Mining and Technology) in 1827, graduating in 1831.
Cotta was born on October 24, 1808, in a forester's lodge, in Zillbach, Germany, the son of Heinrich von Cotta, founder of the Tharandt Forestry Academy near Dresden, and of Christiane Ortmann.
Cotta spent his youth (from 1811) in Tharandt, where he attended the local elementary school and received private instruction. From 1822 to 1826 he attended the humanist Gymnasium of the Holy Cross in Dresden. He also received private instruction in mathematics at Dresden from 1826 to 1827 and enrolled at his father’s school for the summer semester of 1827. At the same time, his father sought his son’s admission to the Freiberg Bergakademic. This, the oldest mining school in Europe, had been made famous by Wener.
Cotta enrolled at the Freiberg Bergakademie (now Freiberg University of Mining and Technology) in 1827. His teachers included such well-known scholars as the mineralogist F. A. Breithaupt, the physicist Ferdinand Reich, the chemist W.A. Lampadius, and the neptunist geognost K.A. Kühn. After completing his studies in 1831, Cotta spent half a year in the mines and foundries of the Erzgebirge before moving to Heidelberg. There he studied under the volcanist K.C. von Leonhard and graduated at the end of 1832 with the dissertation Die Dendrolithen in Beziehung auf ihren inneren Bau, a landmark in the description of the silicified Permian timber of Saxony.
Upon his return to Tharandt, Cotta found employment at the forestry academy. In 1833, however, he agreed to participate in the geological survey of Saxony directed by K.F. Naumann. Cotta mapped a large part of the region, primarily in western Saxony and Lusatia. When this major undertaking was completed in 1845, the critics wrote that this map must be considered “probably the best map of its kind done to date.” At the same time, the old controversy between the neptunists (followers of Werner) and the volcanists (with L. von Buch as principal representative) over the Lusatia overthrust flared up once again. With a masterful, methodical analysis Cotta clarified the situation and proved that neither theory was correct; rather, the granites and syenites had been thrust above the Cretaceous strata long after their solidification.
In 1839 Cotta received a permanent position at the Tharandt Forestry Academy and became its secretary in the autumn of 1840. When his friend Naumann was called to the University of Leipzig, Cotta succeeded him in 1842 as a professor of geognosy and paleontology at the Freiberg Bergakademie. He taught there for thirty-two years, holding his professorship longer than all his predecessors and successors.
Outwardly, Cotta’s life after 1842 was without any particular ups and downs. Neither the 1849 revolution in Saxony (he was an active participant), nor the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, nor the Franco-Prussian War altered his position and his duties. Neither the industrialization of Germany nor the conditions at the Bergakademie itself had any major effect on his work.
Cotta’s principal efforts were devoted to teaching and research at Freiberg. Aware of the Wernerian heritage, during his many years of teaching he developed a far-reaching geological system. From 1842 he lectured on geognosy, from 1843 on paleontology, and in 1851 he introduced a course in ore deposits. This was probably the first course on this subject anywhere.
Cotta traveled extensively. He was in the Alps and northern Italy in 1843, in Switzerland in 1849, in Bukovina in 1854, again in the Alps in 1857 and 1858, in Hungary in 1861, in the Altai in 1868 at the invitation of the Russian czar, and in 1869 in the coal district of southern Russia on the Don. He wrote reports on all trips, some as articles and some as separate works.
Cotta was a founder member of the German Geological Society in December 1848, an honorary member of the Natural science society Isis, Dresden, and a member of the Geological Society of London and of the Bergmännische Verein of Freiberg. Verein of Freiberg. For the special mapping of Thuringia, done completely on his own during his vacations in 1844-1847, the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar decorated him. He was appointed royal Saxon mining adviser and chief mining adviser in 1862, and from 1869 to 1874 he was a member of the board of trustees, and then of the senate, of the Bergakademie.
Cotta contributed numerous observations that led to the definition of new rocks, such as porphyrite, felsite, and banatite. He also emphasized the genesis of minerals; and thus his ideas on alkali and lime during metamorphosis, on ultrametamorphism, palingenesis, and hybrid granites (1855) sound quite moder. Cotta attempted to devise a genetic system of petrography, which received its final form in 1866; the principal groupings are still in use. It was broken down into sediments (mechanical, chemical, organogenetic), metamorphites, and magmatites (acid plutonic and volcanic, basic plutonic and volcanic).
Cotta is regarded as an originator of the science of ore deposits. In the series Gangstudien (1850-1862) he and his students dealt with special topics in that science. He summarized the practical experience gained through his numerous travels and his reading in Die Lehre von den Erzlagerstätten (1855). A “Freiberg school” based on his textbooks became active and later achieved worldwide fame. The degree to which Cotta extended the science of ore deposits from Saxony to the rest of the world was also reflected in the mineral collection at the Freiberg Bergakademie. His science of ore deposits contributed to the fame of the school, which lasted beyond his lifetime.
Cotta was always keenly interested in popularizing scientific findings. At the request of Weigel, a Leipzig publisher, he wrote a commentary (1848-1852) on Kosmos, the brilliant work by Alexander von Humboldt. Between 1852 and 1876 his Geologischen Bilder appeared in six editions.
Thus Cotta became the forerunner of Darwin in Germany and, as early as 1848 (eighteen years before Haeckel), expressed the basic biogenetic law.
(German Edition)
1832(German Edition)
(German Edition)
Cotta was an ardent defender of the concept of evolution even in the inorganic realm. Thus he defended Lyell’s principle of uniformitarianism but took issue with its inherent claim that the history of the earth was merely fluctuation of eternally equal forces, pointing out the earth’s historical development. In the twentieth century, Hans Stille revived Cotta’s concepts and raised them to a new level by connecting Cotta’s continuous, but always new and differently determined, variability by means of a tectonic earth history divided into phases.
Cotta's deliberate concern with philosophy distinguished him from most of his colleagues. He was committed to the empirical study of nature and regarded the world as knowable, but believed that man’s abilities were insufficient for a complete understanding of the world. He should not be counted among the materialists, for he explained natural law by his concept of God and confined the task of natural science to the exploration of the material world, for which he assumed a comprehensive causal relationship. This outlook places Cotta between Humboldt and Darwin.
Nothing is known of Cotta's wife. His daughter, Alice von Cotta, was born in 1842 and worked at Bedford College, London, and later as a school principal at the women's school Victoria-Lyceum in Berlin.