Constant Prévost

[1] He was educated there at the Central Schools, where, inspired by the lectures of Georges Cuvier, his particular mentor Alexandre Brongniart, and André Marie Constant Duméril, he determined to devote himself to natural science.

During the years 1816 to 1819 he took advantage of the necessity of accompanying his associate Philippe de Girard, who was seeking out a site for establishing a textile mill near Vienna, by making a special study of the Viennese Basin.

From 1821-1829 he was professor of geology at the Athenaeum at Paris,[4] and he took a leading part with Ami Boue, Gérard Paul Deshayes and Jules Desnoyers in the founding of the Société géologique de France (1830).

[3] He was on hand with an artist to witness the undersea volcano that produced Ferdinandea (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[5] In 1848 he was elected to his late mentor Brogniart's seat in the Académie des sciences Having studied the volcanoes of Italy and Auvergne, he opposed the views of Christian Leopold von Buch 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, discounting catastrophic events.