BRONGNIART, ALEXANDRE.

Traité élémentaire de Minéralogie, avec des Applications aux Arts; Ouvrage destiné a L'Enseignement dans les Lycées Nationaux. 2 Vols.

Paris, Deterville, 1807. Bound in 2 hcalf, rebacked to style in morocco, spines gilt and with gilt lettering. Contemp. marbled boards. Light wear to edges. XII,564;(4),443,(1) pp. and 16 large folded engraved plates (on 15). A few quires a bit browned. A few scattered brownspots.

First (and his first book) of Brongniart's influential textbook on mineralogy.

"In 1807 Brongniart published Traité élémentaire de minéralogie, a work commissioned as a textbook for his and Haüy’s courses at the Faculté des Sciences and the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. He adopted a simple scheme of classification based mainly on physical properties, but he also made extensive use of Haüy’s crystallographic work. Like other mineralogists at this time, he could not easily distinguish some fine-grained rocks from true simple minerals; but he classed clay and basalt, for example, as fausses espèces, recognizing that they were mélangées although they were too fine-grained to be analyzed. He emphasized the importance of studying the modes of occurrence of minerals as well as their properties, but firmly avoided any discussion of their origins as being too speculative. The sole exception to this was a review of divergent opinions on the aqueous or igneous origin of basalt, but even in this he avoided expressing his own opinion." (DSB II, pp. 493 ff.).
Poggendorff I, 306.

Order-nr.: 44517