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Father of stones

“He presented his teachings with such skill that his audience was steeped in enthusiasm.” (D‘Aubuisson)
In the Freiberg municipal park four dwarf-like miners carry the bust of a true “heavy weight” of science on their shoulders – the portrait of Abraham Gottlob Werner. When the dead body of this “pioneer of modern mineralogy” was brought back to Freiberg from Dresden in 1817 and the funeral procession reached the “Grube Himmelfahrt” (Ascension mine), all the church bells rang and a choral sounded from the tower of the Petrikirche.
Geology, mineralogy, petrology: Werner organised this branch of natural sciences into independent specialist disciplines. The signatures he developed for Saxon rocks were adopted by geologists in all countries and are essentially used until today.