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The Hibsch geological trail was opened in 1927 to mark the 75th birthday of the geologist Josef Emanuel Hibsch. The trail was restored in 2015 and follows the original route almost all the way. Its stops are devoted mostly to forgotten Czech and German researchers, who at the end of the 19th and in the early 20 century made up an important interconnected network of scholars, collectors, local teachers and enthusiasts. These people shaped the contemporary cultural and social life of the whole of the northwestern part of Bohemia. Apart from providing geological information, the aim of the trail is also to revive the memory of at least part of the forgotten Czech-German story.
The restored trail is based on the concept of the original trail – each stop features a stone named after a particular figure. Besides Hibsch’s stone, we can also find the stones of G. C. Laub, F. A. Reuss and his son A. E. Reuss, who have not been forgotten and have their place in the history of geology. Other figures are perhaps less well known, and so it is all the more important that they be commemorated. There is a stone, for instance, in memory of Fritz Seeman (1884–1914), Hibsch’s most gifted pupil and assistant, who was intended to continue in his work, but was killed in World War One in the first battles on the Serbian front in August 1914. Another person commemorated on the trail is Felix Cornu (1882–1909), a talented young scientist, who began a very promising career in a field which has only recently seen the appreciation it deserved – the origin of gels and the role they play in rock formation. This scientist also met with a tragic end; he committed suicide, probably as the result of mental illness. There is also an honorary stone for Franz Wolf von Wolfinau (1841–1920), a professor at the Litoměřice grammar school – he discovered and described fossils of Tertiary plants at local sites, providing a clearer picture of the Tertiary landscape and climate in this country (palms and cinnamon trees used to grow here, for example). The trail is named after J. E. Hibsch, whose scientific work and remarkable maps perfectly described the Central Bohemian Highlands region, so well that all the sites mentioned there can still be identified a hundred years later. In the acknowledgements of his as yet unsurpassed work “Minerály Českého středohoří” (“Minerals of the Central Bohemian Highlands”) from 1934 he mentioned all the collectors and local researchers who had drawn his attention to those interesting places. This work has also preserved a clearer picture of the world at that time, when collecting minerals and fossils was a certain cultural phenomenon linking many people, regardless of their nationality, education and profession.
- References
Radoň, M.: Franz Wolf von Wolfinau – geolog a středoškolský profesor z Litoměřic, Zprávy a studie Regionálního muzea v Teplicích 27, 2008.
Radoň, M.: Fritz Seeman – geolog a nejnadanější žák profesora Hibsche, Zprávy a studie Regionálního muzea v Teplicích 27, 2008.
Radoň, M.: Julius Frieser – soudní úředník a sběratel minerálů, Zprávy a studie Regionálního muzea v Teplicích 27, 2016.
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