The Language of Mineralogy

The specific methods used to construct Enlightenment systems of natural history have proven to be the bête noir of studies that address eighteenth-century culture. This book shows how the classification practices of a defined institutional setting enabled naturalists to create systems of natural history and, by explicitly connecting eighteenth-century geology to the chemistry being taught in medical settings, offers a new interpretation of the nascent earth sciences as they were practiced in Enlightenment Britain.