Undiscovered Scotland

 

This large and imposing book provides a comprehensive and definitive account of Scotland's minerals and the people who discovered, collected and examined them.

There are a number of quite distinct sections. After an introduction covering Scotland's geological evolution, the first main section looks at the collectors themselves and the pioneering role that Scottish scientists played in the development of mineralogy. Driven by the energy of seventeenth and eighteenth-century natural historians, mineralogy developed into a science: here are the key people who brought about this transformation, complete with potted biographies and details of their collections.

The second main part of the book provides details of the sixty-one minerals native to Scotland, with their descriptions, history and occurrence; complete with a superb album of colour photographs of common and unusual Scottish species. Extensive appendixes include a glossary of all 552 known species of Scottish minerals; a history of minerals originally discovered in Scotland; and an extensive bibliography.