Sciences of the Earth

David Oldroyd, The University of New South Wales, Australia

Contents: Introduction; A ’Geological’ Text from Antiquity: Science in the silver age: Aetna, a classical theory of volcanic activity; Early ideas about minerals and mineral analysis: Some Neo-Platonic and Stoic influences on mineralogy in the 16th and 17th centuries; Mechanical mineralogy; Some phlogistic mineralogical schemes, illustrative of the evolution of the concept of 'Earth' in the 17th and 18th centuries; An examination of G.E. Stahl's Philosophical Principles of Universal Chemistry; A note on the status of A.F. Cronstedt's simple earths and his analytical methods; Mineralogy and the ’chemical revolution’; Some 18th-century methods for the chemical analysis of minerals; Edward Daniel Clarke, 1769-1822, and his role in the history of the blow-pipe; The Earth, Method, and History: Robert Hooke's methodology of science as exemplified in his 'Discourse of Earthquakes'; From Renaissance mineral studies to historical geology in the light of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things; Historicism and the rise of historical geology; By grid and group divided: Buckland and the English geological community in the early 19th century; Sir Archibald Geikie ( 1835-1924): geologist, romantic aesthete, and historian of geology: the problem of Whig historiography of science; Index.