ABSTRACT
In the late eighteenth century, throughout Europe and wherever European culture extended, mineralogy was first and foremost a matter of mineral specimens: specimens collected, sorted, named and classified. Specimens were extracted from mines and quarries, hammered out of coastal cliffs or mountain crags, picked out of stream-beds or off the surface of fields, and assembled indoors in museums or private ‘cabinets’. Those who collected these specimens called themselves ‘mineralogists’ or, more broadly, just ‘naturalists’. Around the end of the eighteenth century, yet another criterion – fossils – began to be added to the practice of correlation in geognosy. The mineral specimens that eighteenth-century naturalists collected and classified included many that they considered to be of plant or animal origin. Fossils were collected assiduously from Secondary strata, but their perceived significance was limited. The 1820s and 1830s saw the widespread application of the new fossil-based methods to Secondary rocks in many parts of the world.
