Memorial of Charles Palache,
by Clifford Frondel

Charles Palache was born July 18, 1869, and died December 5, 1954, in the eighty-sixth year of his age. One of the most eminent crystallographers and mineralogists of the world, he lived in a period of revolutionary developments in mineralogical science.

Palache’s ancestors belonged to a group of Sephardic Jews who at the end of the 15th Century were exiled from Portugal to Holland. Much later one family migrated to Jamaica where Charles Palache’s grandfather, John, headed a plantation. For political reasons he abandoned that home in 1834, put his wife and three daughters on a ship sailing for New York, but died before he could follow them in the next boat. Three months later Palache’s father, James, was born in New York City. Lured by reports of gold in California, James left his home at the age of fifteen to serve as cabin boy on a schooner rounding Cape Horn. He landed in San Francisco in 1849. There, established as a merchant, he married Helen D. Whitney, who had traveled from her home in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in a caravan of seven covered wagons. Their son, Charles Palache, was a sensitive boy who at an early age evidenced an intense interest in nature and collected objects of natural history. Palache graduated from Berkley High School, and entered the University of California in 1887. He elected the four years course in mining, since in its content there was more natural history than in any other, and graduated at the top of his class. Andrew C. Lawson was appointed Professor of Geology in his senior year, and Palache returned the following year to assist Lawson in mineralogy and to study for the doctorate, which he received in 1894. Lawson, himself at the start of a long and distinguished career, was a stimulating teacher and it is to him that Palache credited the inspiration that took him from a career in mining into mineralogy. At first Palache’s interests were in field geology and petrography, and with Lawson he did the field work for the first geologic maps of the San Francisco Peninsula and the Berkley area.

In 1894, Palache left for a year of study abroad, first to work under Ferdinand Zirkel at Leipzig, where T. C. Walker and Bundjiro Koto were fellow students, and then to study with Paul Groth and Ernst Weinschenk at Munich. Other American students working in Groth’s laboratory at the time were T. A. Jaggar, A. B. Peck and A. S. Eakle. The winter in Munich was a happy and busy one; and it is recorded in Palache’s journal that "the museums were good, the theatre excellent and there was opera all winter costing students next to nothing." A turning point in his life came the following spring, when he visited Heidelberg. Here he took courses in Petrography under Harry Rosenbusch and Alfred Osann, and was introduced to morphological crystallography by Victor Goldschmidt. Palache threw himself with enthusiasm into the study of crystals, and laid the foundation for the work he pursued so vigorously for the next fifty-five years.

Palache returned to California in the fall of 1895, and in December a letter came from John E. Wolff offering him a small job as his assistant at Harvard. Wolff, Professor in the then newly organized Department of Mineralogy, and Curator of the Mineralogical Museum, succeeding Josiah P. Cooke, was one of a group of Harvard geologists that included William Morris Davis, Nathaniel S. Schaler and Josiah D. Whitney. Wolff’s interests were primarily in petrography and in the year after his retirement in 1922 the instruction and research in this field was taken over by Esper S. Larsen Jr., who with Palache constituted the Department for many years. Palache was named Assistant Professor of Mineralogy in 1902, Professor in 1910, and Professor Emeritus after his retirement in 1941.

Copyright © by the Mineralogical Society of America.