Alfred Antoine François Lacroix is a famous French mineralogist. After high school, he attended the School of Pharmacy in Paris. During these years, he has continued to cultivate his passion for mineralogy and petrography.
He will begin his career as a trainer at the College of France and was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1904. His first work will be devoted to the problems of petrography particularly affecting the contact metamorphism, alteration of rocks by the effect of heat from the rocks basic or lava.
He described many eruptive rocks, some of which have survived in modern petrographic classifications.
Pioneer of volcanology, he devoted the second half of his career in the volcanic phenomenon. Its work will be devoted to the eruptions of Mount Pelee in 1902. He built the first observatory of the Pelee volcano after the eruption of Mount Pelee in 1902. He was also interested in volcanoes of Etna and Vesuvius.
In 1936 he retired from teaching to devote himself to research. It's in his laboratory that he met his death in 1948.
His studies are the source of the explanation of the formation of volcanic domes and pyroclastic flows. His major publications are Mineralogy of France and its colonies (1893-1898) and Mount Pelee and its eruptions (1904).