$6 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PAL/EONTOLOGY. 



A. G. Werner and his School, Leopold von Buch, Alexander 

 von Humboldt. Abraham Gottlob Werner, 1 Professor in the 

 School of Mines at Freiberg, was the most renowned geologist 

 and mineralogist of his day. A born teacher, Werner com- 

 bined quickness of observation and a marvellous memory with 

 the capacity to marshal all the facts that came under his notice 

 into natural systematic order, and to reproduce them orally in 

 lucid language at once striking and convincing to his hearers. 

 His first original work, On the External Characters of Fossils, 

 placed him at once in the front rank of living mineralogists. 

 His fame rose still higher when he began in 1780 to deliver a 

 course of lectures on the science of rock-formations, or, as he 

 called it, " Geognosy." He derived the fundamental concep- 

 tions in his teaching of the formations from the admirable 

 systematic arrangement introduced by the Swedish mineral- 

 ogist, Tobern Bergman. Werner's creation of the study of 

 rock-formations into an independent academical discipline was 

 far-reaching in its effects. Thoughts that had been vaguely 

 shaping themselves in the minds of a few scientific thinkers, 

 important contributions to knowledge which had been locked 

 up, except for the very learned, in the Transactions of scientific 

 societies, were assimilated and mastered by Werner, and 

 taught by him with such precision and enlightenment that 

 Freiberg became in a few years the European lodestar for the 

 study of mineralogy and geognosy. 



The Professor never relaxed his reading and research; his 

 lectures were not written, and they were fresh every year. Kept 

 in touch as he was with all the great academies and universities 

 by the floating body of students whom his teaching attracted, 



1 Abraham Gottlob Werner was born on the 25lh September 1749 

 (according to Frisch, 1750). at Wehrau in Saxony. He belonged to a 

 family which had been actively engaged in the mining industry for three 

 hundred years. His father, who was overseer of a foundry for hammered 

 iron work, taught him in his boyhood to recognise nearly all the known 

 minerals, and after a short period of residence at a school in Silesia, Werner 

 returned to take part in the same foundry as his father. At the age of 

 eighteen he visited Freiberg in the course of a holiday tour, and the sight 

 of the collections and mining schools there roused in him an enthusiastic 

 desire to take up the study of minerals and mining as a career. He studied 

 at Freiberg and Leipzig, and in 1774 published his first paper on " The 

 External Characteristic Features of Fossils." In 1775 Werner was ap- 

 pointed Inspector of Collections and teacher in the School of Mines at 

 Freiberg. This post he held for more than forty years, and died unmarried 

 in 1817. 



