Siegmund August Wolfgang von Herder

August von Herder (18 August 1776 - 29 January 1838) was a German geologist and mineralogist. From 1813 he served in a succession of increasingly senior posts in the Saxon government mines service, ending up in 1826 as government mining director ("Berghauptmann"). He was an energetic and highly effective moderniser of the Saxon mining industry. Biography Sigismund August Wolfgang Herder was born in Bückeburg, an economically diversified hill-town to the west of Hanover. Bückeburg owed much of its prosperity and intellectual dynamism to its status as the long-established administrative and commercial hub of Schaumburg-Lippe. The adjacent Bückeberg hills were an important source of building stone. However, later during 1776, August's family relocated to Weimar after his father accepted a church appointment there, mediated through the intervention of his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as "Generalsuperintendent". August was the second son of the philosopher-poet Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) and his wife, born Maria Karoline Flachsland (1750-1809). Born into an enlightenment milieu, his godparents included Goethe, the Lutheran philosopher Johann Georg Hamann and the journalist-poet Matthias Claudius. Goethe, still a young man, undertook frequent trips to Italy during the 1780s and loved children. Being extremely fond of the Herder children, he allowed them to accompany him. As a teenager Goethe had himself acquired the habit of undertaking lengthy exploratory hikes through the countryside, and having retained the habit into adulthood, he sometimes permitted his friend's teenager son August to accompany him on his "expeditions". Another of his father's friends was the "Africa explorer" and naturalist August von Einsiedel. It was through the interest of these two mentors that August von Herder's interest in Natural sciences, and more specifically in Mineralogy, was awakened. He attended the well regarded Wilhelm-Ernst-Gymnasium (secondary school) in Weimar (where his father served as school-director between 1776 and 1791). He was then sent with his younger brother Wilhelm to spend a year during 1794/95 at Neuchâtel on the francophone western side of Switzerland, principally so that the boys might improve their mastery of the French language. In 1795 he enrolled as a student at the University of Jena. After a year her transferred to Göttingen. He studied Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Mineralogy.