Alexandre Brongniart  Alexandre Brongniart (5 February 17707 October 1847) was a French chemist, mineralogist, geologist, paleontologist and zoologist, who collaborated with Georges Cuvier on a study of the geology of the region around Paris. He was the first to classify Tertiary formations and was responsible for determining geology studies as a subject of science by collecting evidence and informations in the 19th century. Brongniart was also the founder of the Musée national de Céramique-Sèvres (National Museum of Ceramics), having been director of the Sèvres Porcelain Factory from 1800 to 1847. He was born in Paris, the son of the architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart and father of the botanist Adolphe-Théodore Brongniart. In 1797, he became an instructor of natural history at the Central School of the Four Nations, and became the professor of minerology in 1822 at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. He was appointed in 1800 by Napoleon's minister of the interior Lucien Bonaparte director of the revitalized porcelain manufactory at Sèvres, holding this role until death. The young man took to the position a combination of his training as a scientist— especially as a mining engineer relevant to the chemistry of ceramics— his managerial talents and financial acumen and his cultivated understanding of neoclassical esthetic. He remained in charge of Sèvres, through regime changes, for 47 years. Brongniart introduced a new classification of reptiles and wrote several treatises on mineralogy and the ceramic arts. He also made an extensive study of trilobites and made pioneering contributions to stratigraphy by developing fossil markers for dating strata. In 1823, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In his early ages, Brongniart focused on the studies of reptiles and published "Essai dune classification naturally des reptiles" in 1800, which he compared the anatomy of reptiles in order to classify them into different groups. The four classifications were Chelonia, Sauria, Ophidia and Batrachia. However, even-though he classified Batrachia as a sub-class of Reptilia, Brongniart noticed a huge difference in the anatomy of Batrachia compared to the rest of the class. This problem was resolved in 1804 by Pierre Latreille by replacing Batrachia into a class called Amphibians, and the rest of the Reptilia grouping was retained.