He was born in the island of St Thomas in the Danish West Indies, where his father was French consul.

Returning to Paris in the latter year he succeeded Antoine Jérôme Balard at the École Normale, and in 1859 became professor at the Sorbonne in place of J.

[1] In 1841, he began his experiments with investigations of oil of turpentine and tolu balsam, in the course of which he discovered toluene.

[2] With Jules Henri Debray (1827–1888) he worked at the platinum metals, his object being on the one hand to prepare them pure, and on the other to find a suitable metal for the standard metre for the International Metric Commission then sitting at Paris.

With Louis Joseph Troost (born 1825) he devised a method for determining vapour densities at temperatures up to 1400˚C, and, partly with F. Wöhler, he investigated the allotropic forms of silicon and boron.