Josiah Parsons Cooke was born in
Boston, Massachusetts on October 12, 1827. He attended
Boston Latin School and as a teenager set up his own chemical laboratory, partly due to an interest sparked by lectures of
Yale's
Benjamin Silliman. The teaching of chemistry at Harvard was in poor shape at this time, so after Cooke entered the university in 1843 he continued to be largely self-taught in the subject. Cooke graduated from Harvard in 1848 with an
A.B., and became a mathematics tutor there the following year. In 1850 he was elected the Erving Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy at Harvard, although he had had little formal education in chemistry. Reversing the modern order, after Cooke obtained his professorship he embarked on a plan of advanced study, spending eight months in Europe attending the lectures of
Dumas and
Regnault. This was followed by investigations of the atomic weights of arsenic and other elements. In 1857 he published a collection of chemical problems for use of the undergraduates of
Harvard College with reference to the
Elements of Chemistry by
Julius Adolph Stöckhardt. By 1862 Cooke also was publishing in the new field of
spectroscopy. He studied crystals throughout his career, and the mineral "
Cookeite", an
aluminosilicate quartz, is named after him. In addition to his research efforts, Cooke taught a course in introductory chemistry for over forty years and was, by all accounts, quite successful at it. According to Jackson, Cooke published forty-one scientific papers based on his research and thirty-two on other subjects, along with at least eight books. Among the areas in which Cooke took an interest and published in was the
relationship between religion and science. In 1860, Cooke married Mary H. Huntington, the daughter of
Elisha Huntington and sister of
William Reed Huntington; the couple had no children. In 1859–1860, Huntington's brother William was Assistant in Chemistry for Cooke at Harvard. Cooke died September 3, 1894, in
Newport, Rhode Island, and was buried at
Mount Auburn Cemetery. ==Selected writings==