The Founders Of Geology

By Sir Andrew Geikie
Dover Publications, Inc
1962

Dover Publication writes:

The later half of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century are especially interesting to students of geology, for it was during those seventy years that the main modern foundations of the science were laid. This book surveys the high moments and central figures in that era of seminal geological activity.

It recounts the story of the progress of geological ideas by reviewing the careers of some of the leaders by whom the progress was chiefly effected, giving full consideration to the lives and work of these major figures, and indicating in the process how geological ideas arose and were slowly worked out into the forms which they now wear. Some of the men whose careers and contributions are examined are Palissy, Guettard, Desmarest, Pallas, De Saussure, Arduino, Lehman, Fuchsel, Werner, Hutton, Playfair, Sir James Hall, Giraud-Soulavie, Cuvier, Michell, Lyell, Logan, Darwin, Agassiz, Nicol, and others.

The author discusses such matters as geological ideas among the Greeks and Romans; growth of geological ideas in the Middle Ages; scientific cosmogonists—Descartes and Leibnitz; the rise of geology in France; the foundation of volcanic geology; the rise of geological travel; the history of the doctrine of geological succession; the Wernerian school of geology; the rise of the modern conception of the theory of the earth; the birth of experimental geology; the rise of stratigraphical geology and paleontology; early teachers and textbooks; the transition or Greywacke formation resolved into the Cambrian, Silurian and Devonian systems; the primordial fauna of Barrande; the pre-Cambrian rocks first begun to be set in order; the influence of Darwin; adoption of zonal stratigraphy of fossiliferous rocks; the rise of glacial geology; the development of geological map-making in Europe and North America; the rise of petrographical geology; and other related topics.