Antedating of "geology"

[Jesse Sheidlower]

> 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.

...Perhaps by looking in the OED, seeing the 1735 example,
and other 18th-century examples, and either mistaking OED's
sense 1 for the modern sense (OED's sense 2) or disagreeing
with the OED's interpretation.

OED gives sense 1 as "The science which treats of the earth
in general", labelled obsolete, and distinguished from sense
2, which deals with the investigation of the earth's crust
etc. This is the specific sense Fred was antedating.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED