Thomas Sterry Hunt

Thomas Sterry Hunt (September 5, 1826 – February 12, 1892), American geologist and chemist, was born at Norwich, Connecticut.

He lost his father when twelve years old, and had to earn his own livelihood. In the course of two years he found employment in a printing office, in an apothecary shop, in a book store and as a clerk. He became interested in natural science, and especially in chemical and medical studies, and in 1845 he was elected a member of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists at Yale – a body which four years later became the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In 1848 he read a paper in Philadelphia On Acid Springs and Gypsum Deposits of the Onondaga Salt Group. At Yale he became assistant to Professor B. Silliman, Jun., and in 1846 was appointed chemist to the Geological Survey of Vermont. In 1847 he was appointed to similar duties on the Canadian Geological Survey at Montreal under Sir William Logan, and this post he held until 1872. He resigned to become professor of geology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. New International Encyclopedia

In 1859 he was elected fellow of the Royal Society, and he was one of the original members and president of the Royal Society of Canada. He was made Chevalier or the Legion of Honor in France and an honorary doctor of laws of the University of Cambridge. He was a frequent contributor to scientific journals, writing on the crystalline limestones, the origin of continents, the chemistry of the primeval earth, on serpentines, etc. He also wrote a notable Essay on the History of the names Cambrian and Silurian (Canadian Naturalist, 1872), in which the claims of Sedgwick, with respect to the grouping of the Cambrian strata, were forcibly advocated.

Hunt first proposed the theory which linked climate change to concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a meeting for the British Society for the Advancement of Science in the fall of 1878. This was a few years before Arrhenius established the theory of the greenhouse effect.

He died in New York City on the 12th of February 1892. The Thomas-Sterry-Hunt International Ecological Reserve, an ecological reserve in Quebec, Canada was established on September 7, 1988.

His publications include:

• Chemical and Geological Essays (1875, ed. 2, 1879)
• Mineral Physiology and Physiography (1886)
• A New Basis for Chemistry (1887, ed. 3, 1891)
• Systematic Mineralogy (1891)

See an obituary notice by Persifor Frazer, Amer. Geologist (xi. Jan. 1893), with portrait.