FROM MINERALOGY TO GEOLOGY. The Foundations of aScience, 1650-1830. Rachel Laudan, 1987. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, xii + 278 p., hardbound. $27.50.
Laudan stresses that contrary to the received view of the history of geology (by Lyell and repeated by Geikie), geology started at the end of the eighteenth century, not the early nineteenth; that it was a development within mineralogy; that “…the Wernerians formulated the conceptual foundations of geology and dominated its intellectual and institutional development in the period between 1780 and 1830,” and finally, that it was not a British but a German accomplishment...
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