Background
Friedrich Adolph Roemer was born on April 15, 1809, in Hildesheim, Germany. His father was a lawyer and councillor of the high court of justice.
University of Gottingen, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany
Friedrich Roemer studied law at the University of Gottingen.
Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Friedrich Roemer studied law at the University of Berlin.
Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Lower Saxony, Germany
Tomb of Friedrich Adolph Roemer at the old cemetery of Clausthal.
https://www.amazon.com/Synopsis-Mineralogie-Geognosie-Wissenschaftlich-Naturgeschichte/dp/0331179814/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=Synopsis+der+Mineralogie+und+Geognosie&qid=1576757305&s=books&sr=1-5
1853
(Part 1)
Part 1
https://www.amazon.com/Beitr%C3%A4ge-Geologischen-Kenntniss-Nordwestlichen-Harzgebirges/dp/1245876961/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=Beitr%C3%A4ge+zur+geologischen+Kenntniss+des+nordwestlichen+Harzgebirges&qid=1576757356&s=books&sr=1-3
1854
geologist paleontologist scientist stratigraphy
Friedrich Adolph Roemer was born on April 15, 1809, in Hildesheim, Germany. His father was a lawyer and councillor of the high court of justice.
Like his younger brother Ferdinand, Roemer attended the Gymnasium in Hildesheim. Then from 1828 to 1831 he studied law at Gottingen and Berlin.
After studying law at Gottingen and Berlin, Roemer then was a judicial official in Hildesheim and in Bovenden, near Gottingen. In 1843 he was transferred to the Mining Office at Clausthal in the Harz Mountains. A few years later Roemer was placed in charge of teaching geology and mineralogy at the Mining School in that city, and in 1862 he was appointed its director. He resigned from the government service in 1867 because of poor health. In the last years of his life, Roemer gave large sums of money and donated his extensive collections of minerals and fossils to the city museum of Hildesheim, which had been founded by his younger brother Hermann; the museum still bears the family name.
Roemer’s independent study of geology and paleontology dates from his appointment as a judicial officer in Hildesheim, and his interest was inspired by geological conditions in the area. Lacking both formal training and research experience, he began his investigations in the northwestern German Jurassic. He obtained the necessary paleontological literature from libraries in Gottingen and Hannover and copied it, including the illustrations, in his own hand.
Roemer’s first extensive work, Die Versteinerungen des norddeutschen Oolithen-Gebirges, appeared in 1836. It provided the first insight into the fossil riches (over 250 new species) and stratigraphic subdivisions of the northwestern German Jurassic, as well as a comparison with the southern German and English Jurassic. The results of his subsequent investigations, which were extended to the Cretaceous, appeared in 1841 as Die Versteinerungen des norddeutschen Kreidegebirges; nine species of plants, seven hundred fifty of Metazoa, thirty-three of Foraminifera, and seven of Ostracoda were described. Until then knowledge of the Cretaceous fossils in northwestern Germany was incomplete, and the stratigraphic division contained many errors. Beyrich, a severe critic, recognized the importance of these studies in 1849 and praised them.
In the meantime, the publications of Murchison and Sedgwick on the Silurian and Devonian in England had attracted Roemer's attention. They led to his concern with the Harz Mountains, on the northwest border of which Hildesheim lies and in the middle of which Clausthal is located. In six long papers published between 1843 and 1866, Roemer described primarily the Devonian and Lower Carboniferous of the northwestern Harz with regard to its fossil contents and detailed stratigraphic division.
These works represented major progress in knowledge of the Devonian and Lower Carboniferous. When Roemer began his investigations in the Harz, only a few fossils from three or four localities - most of them incorrectly interpreted - were known. When he completed them, he had described more than 500 species, from many localities, of mostly varied stratigraphic position within the Devonian and Lower Carboniferous. Moreover, he published monographs on the Tertiary Bryozoa and Anthozoa, as well as on the Cretaceous sponges of northwestern Germany. His serious interest in botany, which dated from his school days, is attested to by a large work on the algae of Germany (1845).
In addition to specialized studies, Roemer produced comprehensive summary presentations of his field of study. Thus in 1853, he composed - at the request of a friend, the biologist Johannes Leunis - the third part (geology and mineralogy) of the latter’s Synopsis der drei Naturreiche, a popular and widely disseminated work. The Synopsis also presented contemporary knowledge in zoology and botany. Roemer's talent for synopsis was due in no small measure to his teaching, over a period of twenty-four years, at the Mining School (now the Technical University) of Clausthal. The extensive mineral collection there - one of the largest in Germany - is the result of his work.
(Part 1)
1854