98 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



younger formations of the earth's crust, or his proofs that 

 the strata succeed each other in a definite order in the 

 region with which he was acquainted. 



Contemporary with Lehmann, and though less fre- 

 quently quoted, worthy of a still higher place in the bede- 

 roll of geological worthies, was George Christian Fuchsel 

 (1722-1773). 1 This remarkable man was the son of a baker 

 in Ilmenau, at the northern foot of the Thuringian Forest. 

 He studied at the Universities of Jena and Leipzig, and 

 having from an early date addicted himself to minerals 

 and rocks, he was lucky enough to find a seam of coal at 

 Muhlberg, near Erfurt, and still more fortunate to receive 

 from the proprietor of the ground a reward of 200 crowns 

 for the discovery. At Erfurt he took his degree of Doctor 

 of Medicine, and eventually became physician to the Prince 

 of Eudolstadt. He lived to the age of only fifty-one, and 

 died in the year 1773. 



His position at Eudolstadt was favourable for the 

 cultivation of his taste for geological pursuits. To the 

 south rose the ancient rocks of the Thuringer Wald, 

 flanked by the great series of Permian and Triassic 

 formations, regularly superposed upon each other, and 

 cut out into valleys by the rivers that drain the mountain 

 range. In the year 1762, when he was forty years of age, 

 he published one of the most remarkable treatises which 

 up to that time had been devoted to the description of the 

 actual structure and history of the earth. It was in Latin, 

 and, under the title of " A History of the Earth and the 



1 For the data here given I am indebted to a brief notice by C. 

 Keferstein in the Journal de Geologic, vol. ii. (1830), p. 191, and to his 

 account of Fuchsel in his Geschichte und Litteratur der Geognosie (1840), 

 p. 55 seq. 



