Francke, Hugo (1860- )

Hermann Hugo Alfred Francke born in Plauen near Dresden on March 31, 1860, the eldest child of Ida Scheffel and Christian Guido Hermann Francke, an economist and landowner. In 1873 he attended the Kreuzschule Gymnasium in Dresden, graduating in 1882, and then enrolled at the University of Jena to study Natural History. There he concentrated on the subject of mineralogy, which had fascinated him since his early school years. The following year he was hired as an Assistant to the Mineralogical Institute at Jena. Unfortunately his montor there, Geh. Hofrats Prof. Dr. E. E. Schmid, died in 1885, rendering Francke an academic "orphan," unable to complete his mineralogical studies there for lack of any other mineralogist on the faculty. Consequently Francke left Jena to enroll at the University of Leipzig, where he completed his PhD program, devoting most of his work time during his eight terms in Leipzig to a study of the history of mineralogy and mineralogical litertature, along with some linguistic studies.

In 1890 Francke published Über die mineralogische Nomenklatur, a now very scarce and overlooked but important and thorough study of mineralogical names, what they encompass, their history, species and variety names, characteristics of such names, rules governing their choice, etc. This work is an extension of the his doctoral dissertation, Die allgemeinen Grundsätze bei der Bildung wissenschaftlicher Mineralnamen that was presented at the University of Leipzig in 1889 (vitae from which are incorporated here).