John Lawrence Smith (December 17, 1818 – October 12, 1883) was an American chemist and mineralogist. He published extensively on analytical chemistry and mineralogy, including Mineralogy and Chemistry, Original Researches (1873; enlarged with biographical sketches, 1884). His collection of meteorites was the finest in the United States, and upon his death, he passed it to Harvard. The J. Lawrence Smith Medal is named in his honor. Education J. Lawrence Smith was reportedly born either near Charleston, South Carolina, or in Louisville, Kentucky. He was educated at the University of Virginia, he entered the Medical College of South Carolina, receiving a medical degree in 1840. His graduation thesis was an essay on the "Compound Nature of Nitrogen." He then went to Europe to continue his studies. In Paris he studied widely, taking classes in chemistry, toxicology, physics, mineralogy and geology. His teachers there included Théophile-Jules Pelouze. After meeting Justus von Liebig in Giessen, Germany, he spent his summers studying in Giessen and his winters studying in Paris. Career By 1843, he had returned to the United States. In 1844 he began the practice of medicine at Charleston. In 1846, he helped to establish the Medical and Surgical Journal of South Carolina. His tastes, however, clearly tended more towards chemical analysis than towards medicine. He spent much of his time improving methods for analytical chemistry, and applying them to problems in chemical analysis. He examined various problems in agricultural chemistry, including the composition of soils, the value of marls and fossil bones, and the growing of cotton. As a result, he was selected by Secretary James Buchanan to go to Turkey, in response to a request from the Sultan of Turkey for a scientific advisor on cultivating cotton. Between 1846 and 1850, Smith investigated the mineral resources of Turkey, for Turkey's government, and he discovered deposits of coal, chrome ore, and the famous emery deposits of Naxos. In Turkey he discovered liebigite, naming it after Justus von Liebig. Smith returned to the United States in 1850, and perfected the inverted microscope, an invention which he had begun working on while abroad. He was apparently offered a professorship at the University of New Orleans, but wrote in December, 1850, that it "at present exists but in name." Some of his papers from this period style him as professor of chemistry at the University of Louisiana (now Tulane University), New Orleans, Louisiana. By October