A Treatise on the External, Chemical, and Physical Characters of Minerals
Cambridge Library Collection - Earth Science Series

The renowned geologist Robert Jameson (1774?1854) held the chair of natural history at Edinburgh from 1804 until his death. A pupil of Gottlob Werner at Freiberg, he was in turn one of Charles Darwin's teachers. Originally a follower of Werner's influential theory of Neptunism to explain the formation of the earth's crust, he was later won over by the idea that the earth was formed by natural processes over geological time. Jameson was a controversial writer, accused of bias towards those who shared his Wernerian sympathies, such as Cuvier, while attacking Playfair, Hutton and Lyell. This book, first published in 1805, of which the 1816 second edition is reissued here, gives physical descriptions of the minerals discussed in his three-volume System of Mineralogy (also reissued in this series). Dividing minerals into solid, friable and fluid types, he describes and gives the English, German, French and Latin names of each.

Advertisement; 1. Particular generic external characters of solid minerals; 2. Particular generic external characters of friable minerals; 3. Particular generic external characters of fluid minerals; 4. Remaining general generic external characters; 5. Chemical characters of minerals; 6. Physical characters of minerals; 7. Geognostic and geographic characters.