ROMÉ DE L'ISLE, J.B.

Description méthodique d'une collection des minéraux du cabinet de M.D.R.D.L. Ouvrage où l'on donne de nouvelles idées sur la formation & la décomposition des Mines, avec un court exposé des sentimens des Minéralogistes les plus connus, sur la nature de chaque espèce, le Minéralisateur qui s'y rencontre, & la quantité de métal qu'elle produit.

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Paris, Didot jeune/ Knapen, 1773. 8vo (195 x 125mm). pp. xxxii, 299, (3), (2, Approbation, Privilege). Old vellum, spine with recent red label.

Lacking half title and frontispiece. First edition of this catalogue of the minerals in Romé de Lisle's own mineral cabinet. Romé 'earned money by cataloguing at least fourteen mineral collections, according to his own, probably incomplete, list in the bibliography to his Cristallographie of 1783. Three of the catalogues remained in manuscript... In 1773 he brought out a description of the metallic ores of his own mineral cabinet, in which he discussed the origin, metamorphosis, and paragenesis of each' (DSB).
The descriptions are highly detailed, in terms of locale, mineral and crystal structure, composition, etc. The minerals are cross-referenced to Romé's 'Essai de cristallographie' (1772), the work in which he had established that crystallography was the basis of mineralogical classification. This was amplified in his epochal 'Cristallographie' in 1783, in which he established the general form of the law of constancy of interfacial angles and that each species of mineral has his characteristic primitive form and each form its characteristic constant angles. Pp. xx-xv contain a bibliography of works cited.

Provenance: Old duplicate of the Geological Society of London with their stamp on title.

Hoover 690; Ward and Carozzi 1908