Jean Baptiste Armand Louis Leonce Elie De Beaumont, a French geologist, born at Canon, Calvados, Sept. 25, 1798. In 1821 he undertook, by order of the government, a series of metallurgical explorations, and was made on his return in 1824 a mining engineer. In 1829 he became professor at the school of mines, in 1832 at the college de France, and in 1833 engineer-in-chief. After the death of Francois Arago he was made perpetual secretary of the academy of sciences. Napoleon III. appointed him senator. He was appointed in 1823, together with Dufrenoy, to aid M. Brochant de Villiers in preparing the materials for the geological map of France; and in this commission they were charged to visit England, where a similar work was in progress, and at the same time to examine the metallurgical operations there practised. The results of their investigations were published by Dufrenoy and Elie de Beaumont in a work entitled Voyage metal-lurgique en Angleterre (1827), illustrated with numerous plates, and afterward enlarged with the aid of Leon Coste and Perdonnet. Elie de Beaumont afterward devoted himself almost exclusively to geological researches, while engaged upon the preparation of the map of France, and published frequent papers in the Annales des mines and other scientific journals.

In his Notice sur les systemes des montagnes (1852), he endeavored to prove that mountain chains are to be classed according to the direction of their range, all those lying parallel with the same great circle of the earth, wherever they may be found, having been uplifted suddenly during the same geological epoch. He described in the last edition of his work the features of no less than 95 systems of mountains; and the facts he collected added largely to the geological knowledge of the day. A decree of 1868 appointed him to direct a geological survey of France.