Hunt, Thomas Sterry

(b. Norwich, Connecticut, 5 September 1826; d. New York, New York, 12 February 1892)

Chemistry, geology.

Hunt’s parents, Peleg Hunt and Jane Elizabeth Sterry, were both descended from Puritan stock. In 1845, after desultory schooling until the age of thirteen and numerous trivial jobs, he came to the attention of the elderly Benjamin Silliman. Silliman, struck by his Faraday-like enthusiasm for a scientific career, arranged for his son, Benjamin, professor of chemistry at Yale, to employ Hunt by making him analyze minerals for C. B. Adams’ Geological Survey of Vermont, and his proven ability led to his appointment (1846–1872) as mineralogist and chemist to the Geological Survey of Canada, which was under the directorship of Sir William Logan and, from 1869, of A. R. C. Selwyn.

While working with the Survey, Hunt acted as part-time professor of chemistry at the University of Laval, Quebec (where he lectured in fluent French from 1856 to 1862), and at McGill University, Montreal, from 1862 to 1868. On his return to the United States in 1872 he became professor of geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and chemist to the second Geological Survey of Pennsylvania under J. P. Lesley. Hunt retired from both positions in 1878 in order to pursue geological consultancy and a literary career. In 1871 he married Anna Gale, a Canadian; six years later their childless marriage ended in separation. A frequent visitor to Europe, Hunt was personally acquainted with most of the leading English and French scientists. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and a prime mover in the creation of the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Canada, and the first International Congress of Geologists in Paris (1878).

Hunt, who was brought up as a Congregationalist, was converted to Roman Catholicism in Canada, but he abandoned formal religion during the 1860’s for a simple deistic and poetic natural theology. An egotistical if scintillating conversationalist and lecturer, Hunt damaged his chemical and geological reputation both in America and Europe by his strident, obsessive concern for professional recognition of the priority of his innovations; while in a censorious age his personal nonconformity brought him humiliating ostracism.

The two principal influences on Hunt were the revolutionary chemistry of Laurent and Gerhardt, which he introduced to America, and the early philosophical writings of the German-American Naturphilosoph J. B. Stallo, which led him to the enthusiastic study of Kant, Hegel, and Oken. Hunt’s polemical and priority-seeking style has led to some confusion in the literature of the history of chemistry. It will be sufficient to state here that Hunt did not invent the organic chemist’s “water-type,” but that like Gerhardt and Williamson he saw its possibilities after Laurent had first mentioned it; and that, although he was probably the first to propose that silica is the “carbon” of mineralogy, Hunt was not the first to define organic chemistry as “the chemistry of carbon compounds” — here he was merely following Gerhardt.

Inspired with a belief in the unity of nature, Hunt wrote speculative and transcendental works which frequently ignored facts that were inconsistent with his own or other geologists’ field observations. As a chemist Hunt rejected atomism for a continuum physics in which all chemical changes were explained by interpenetration or solution, and not by the arrangements of invariant atoms. He extended Gerhardt’s concept of homologous series of organic compounds to mineralogy, wherein he conceived minerals to possess “molecular weights” much greater than the current atomic theory suggested. He assumed that minerals having similar crystalline forms possessed identical equivalent volumes and hence, from analogy with gases, that their equivalent weights (or “integral weights”) were proportional to their densities. Establishing this relationship enabled him, “having fixed an equivalent weight for one species, to calculate, from the densities, those of the species isomorphous with it” (Chemical and Geological Essays [1875], p. 440). These attempts by Hunt, Oliver Wolcott Gibbs, and others to derive minerals, like silicates, from polyacids were shown to be ineffective after the advent of X-ray crystal analysis. Hunt also developed an elaborate “natural system” of mineral classification which, despite its attractive compromise between existing systems based on either chemical or external characteristics, was not influential.

As a geologist, Hunt played a major part in Logan’s elucidation of the Laurentian and Huronian systems. His own primary interest was in Paleozoic rocks, the history of which, he argued, in the absence of fossils and stratigraphic evidence, could be deduced by extrapolating from the existing mineral species that they contained the supposed prehistoric chemical conditions necessary for their origin. This so-called crenitic hypothesis was most influentially expressed in 1867 in his essay “The Chemistry of the Primeval Earth” (Chemical News, 15 [1867], 315–317, reprinted in Chemical and Geological Essays). Aware of the significance of H. Sainte-Claire Deville’s work on dissociation, Hunt supposed that as the earth had cooled, familiar elements and compounds had formed. After certain climatic changes had occurred, condensed water had permeated the porous surface of the earth and dissolved chemicals which, subject to the extraordinary catastrophic conditions of the earth’s hot interior, had undergone metamorphosis. These transformed materials (proto-minerals) had then been brought to the earth’s surface “after the manner of modern springs,” and had there been deposited as crystalline layers of granite, gneiss, or even serpentine. Other geologists found an igneous origin for these rocks more credible. But despite protracted polemics with Dana, William Logan, and David Forbes, Hunt remained stubbornly resistant to other points of view, never abandoning his modified neptunism. His inorganic “evolutionary” views, however, shorn of their controversial geological context, influenced the chemical speculations of B. C. Brodie, Jr., and Lockyer, and, through them, Crookes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Hunt published well over 350 papers, a virtually complete list of which may be found in Douglas or Adams. Hunt’s style is repetitious; his papers, full of self-citations, were reprinted by him in his books of 1875, 1886, and 1887.

Hunt’s works include “Introduction to Organic Chemistry,” a section appended to B. Silliman, Jr., First Principles of Chemistry, 25th ed. (Philadelphia, 1852), with innumerable later eds.; Esquisse géologique du Canada, pour servirà I’ntelligence de la carte géologique et de la collection desminéraux économiques envoyées à I’Exposition universelle de Paris 1855 (Paris, 1855), written with W. E. Logan, translated as Canada at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 (Toronto, 1856); The Geology of Canada (Montreal, 1863), written with Logan; Petroleum, its Geological Relations, With Special Reference to its Occurrence in Gaspé (Quebec, 1865); Esquisse géologique du Canada. Suivie d’un catalogue descriptif de la collection de cartes et coupes géologiques, livres imprimes, roches, fossiles, et minéraux économiques, envoyée áI’Exposition universelle de 1867 (Paris, 1867); The Coal and Iron of Southern Ohio (Salem, Mass., 1874); Chemical and Geological Essays (Boston-London, 1875; 2nd ed., Salem, 1878; 3rd ed., New York, 1890; 4th ed., New York, 1891).

See also Special Report on the Trap Dykes and Azoic Rocks of South-Eastern Pennsylvania: Part I. Historical Introduction, Second Geological Survey of Pennsylvania, Report E (Harrisburg, 1878); there is no part II; Coal and Iron in Southern Ohio, the Mineral Resources of the Hockey Valley (Boston, 1881); Mineral Physiology and Physiography. A Second Series of Chemical and Geological Essays (Boston, 1886; 2nd ed., New York, 1890); A New Basis for Chemistry, A Chemical Philosophy (Boston, 1887; 2nd ed., 1888), trans. by W. Spring as Un système chimique nouveau, (Paris-Liége, 1889; 3rd ed., New York, 1891), with dedication to J. B. Stallo; and Systematic Mineralogy Based on a Natural Classification (New York, 1891).

Other works are Geological Survey of Canada. Report of Progress for the Year 1852–3 (Quebec, 1854). Reports for years 1853 to 1856 were published from Toronto, and for 1857 to 1872 from Montreal. In addition see Geological Survey of Canada: Reprot of Progress from its Commencement to 1863, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1863–1865).

For an important letter from Hunt to Gerhardt, written in 1847, see E. Grimaux and C. Gerhardt, Charles Gerhardt, sa vie, son oeuvre, sa correspondance 1816–1856 (Paris, 1900), pp. 166–167. One of the more significant of Hunt’s literary polemics, concerning geological chemistry or chemical geology, was with the English geologist David Forbes; see Geological Magazine, 4 (1867), 433–444, and 5 (1868), 49–59, 105–111, which contains references to Chemical News.

Collections of Hunt’s letters are held at Edinburgh University Library, Scotland (Lyell papers); Royal Society, London; Columbia University Library; and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington.

II. Secondary Literature. The best obituaries are those by James Douglas, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Memorial Volume, 1 (1900), 63–121, with photograph and bibliography; and F. D. Adams, Biographical Memoris. National Academy of Sciences, 15 (1934), 207–238, with photograph and bibliography.

For Hunt as a geologist and mineralogist, see G. P. Merrill, The First One Hundred Years of American Geology (New York, 1924; repr. New York-London, 1964), pp. 246, 367, 410–11, 445–447, 565, 608; and E. F. Smith, “Mineral Chemistry,” in C. A. Browne, ed., “A Half-Century of Chemistry in America, 1876–1926,” ch. 6 of supp. to Journal of the American Chemical Society, 48 (1926), 79–83. For Hunt’s philosophy of science see E. R. Atkinson, “The Chemical Philosophy of Thomas Sterry Hunt,” in Journal of Chemical Education, 20 (1943), 244–245; W. H. Brock, ed., The Atomic Debates (Leicester, 1967), pp. 13, 24–26, 127, 156, 160, 171; and D. M. Knight, “Steps Towards a Dynamical Chemistry,” in Ambix, 14 (1967), 190–194.

W. H. Brock