Hauy

Hauy, Rene Just (1743-1822), an eminent French mineralogist, was born of poor parents at St. Just, Oise, in 1743. Sent by friends to the College of Navarre, Paris, he at first devoted himself to botany, but afterwards to crystallography, the pyro-electric properties of minerals and general mineralogy. He discovered the geometrical laws of cleavage in crystals (q.v.) and the connection between pyro-electricity and hemihedralism. He was a canon of Notre Dame, and became professor of mineralogy at the Museum of Natural History.

He died in 1822.