Ami Boué (1794–1881), a geoscientist of the 19th century

Born on 16 March 1794 in Hamburg as a son of a Huguenot family whose members made big fortune as ship-owners, Ami Boué took his doctor’s degree in medicine in 1817 at the University of Edinburgh. During the following years, he completed his knowledge in the field of natural sciences, especially in Geoscience. In 1830, after having founded, with other scientists, among whom Constant Prévost and Gérard-Paul Deshayes, the Geological Society of France, in which Boué became the first president, he left Paris in 1835 and settled in Vienna. In 1836, 1837 and 1838 he crossed the Balkans. In his masterpiece La Turquie d’Europe (Paris, 1840, four volumes), he published the results of this research. In his study, Ami Boué intended to join the Austrian empire with Turkey by railways. Anyway, Boué’s works concerning the Balkans were fundamental for the future generations of Austrian geoscientists.