GUETTARD, JEAN ÉTIENNE.

Mémoire sur les granits de France, comparés a ceux d'Égypte (+) Memoire sur quelques corps fossiles peu connus [In "Histoire de L'Academie Royale des Sciences. Année M. DCCLI" 1751,].

Paris, l'Imprimerie Royale, 1755. 4to. In a nice contemporary full mottled calf binding with five rasied bands and rchly gilt spines. Gilt borders on covers. In "Histoire de L'Academie Royale des Sciences. Année M. DCCLI" 1751, entire volume offered. Small tear to upper part of spine and ex-libris pasted on to pasted down front end-paper. A fine copy. Pp. 164-210 + folded map. [entire volume: (8), 202, 536 pp + 23 folded plates.

First edition of Guettard important paper which includes one of the very earliest mineralogical/geological maps of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Guettard, French naturalist and mineralogist, was born at Étampes, near Paris. In the mit 1740ies, he communicated to the Academy of Sciences in Paris a memoir on the distribution of minerals and rocks, and this was accompanied by a map on which he had recorded his observations. He thus, as remarked by W. D. Conybeare, "first carried into execution the idea, proposed by Martin Lister years before, of geological maps." In the course of his journeys he made a large collection of fossils and figured many of them, but he had no clear ideas about the sequence of strata.

The present volume contain many original scientific contributions by scientists such as Du Hamel, Daubenton, Fouchy, Bouguer.

Order-nr.: 58916