Antedating of "Geology"

[Greg Pulliam]

Simon Winchester, author of "The Professor and the Madman," which,
incidentally, is about the OED, has a more recent book out called
"The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of
Modern Geology" (2001, HarperCollins, NY:NY).  In a footnote on page
25, Winchester says of the term _geology_ that it

"is first used in English in its modern sense in 1735, though only
rarely--and probably not until 1795 can it be considered a mature and
full-fledged concept.  There was no mention of geology in the 1797
Third Edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, but the Fourth,
which came out in 1810, had a lengthy entry, the science now fully
established."

No specifics here, obviously, but Winchester seems to have come
across some use of the term significantly earlier than 1795, or 1791.

Greg Pulliam


>
>
>Here is an antedating of a highly important scientific term, the familiar
>sense of the word "geology," obtained from searching JSTOR:
>
>geology (OED, sense 2., 1795)
>
>1791  _Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society of London_ 81.68  This
>inveterate error ... has effectually barred the way to all great
>discoveries in geology till of late.
>
>
>Fred Shapiro
>
>
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>Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
>Associate Librarian for Public Services     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
>   and Lecturer in Legal Research            Yale University Press,
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