Belsazar Hacquet

The author hypothesised that Balthasar Hacquet was a son of a poor mother and an unknown father, baptised on 11 August 1736 as Jean.

[3] He was the first after Carl Linnaeus to distinguish the mineral dolomite from the limestone and described it already in 1778, 13 years earlier than Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu, as the "stinking stone" (German: Stinkstein, Latin: lapis suillus).

[4][5] Among Hacquet's written works is the four-volume Oryctographia Carniolica, which included a geological and mineralogical study of Carniola, Istria, and surrounding districts.

As a botanist Hacquet wrote a book on alpine flora from Carniola called Plantae alpinae Carniolicae.

The botanical genus Hacquetia (now sunk into Sanicula) is named after him, as well as the plant species Pedicularis hacquetii (Hacquet's lousewort).

On one of his excursions, he discovered "on the evening, Trenta side of Triglav, a new species of scabious" and picked it for his herbarium collection, nowadays preserved in the Natural History Museum of Slovenia.

The Austrian botanist, Anton Kerner von Marilaun, later proved Belsazar Hacquet had not found a new species, but a specimen of the already known submediterranean Cephalaria leucantha.

In Ljubljana he operated a natural history cabinet (German: Naturalienkabinet), which was appreciated throughout Europe and was visited by the highest nobility, including the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, the Russian grand duke Paul and Pope Pius VI, as well as by famous naturalists, such as Francesco Griselini [it] and Franz Benedikt Hermann [de].

[6] A memorial relief to Belsazar Hacquet was erected in 1987 in Ljubljana at Upper Square (Slovene: Gornji trg) on the facade of the house No.