Beudant, Francois-Sulpice; Traite Elementaire de Mineralogie. Paris, Chez, Verdiere, 1824. Octavo, pp. vi, 856, 10 folded plates, folded table.

In recent calf, marbled boards, gold spine titles, light foxing to title page, very good.
FREE SHIPPING ON ALL ITEMS

A French geologist and mineralogist, Beudant (1787-1850) was educated at the Ecole Polytechnic in Paris. He is noted for his studies of minerals, his scientific narratives on the geology and mineralogy of Hungary and the above highly regarded mineralogical text which was considered at the time to be the best authority in French mineralogy. Louis XVIII appointed Beudant as assistant director of his cabinet of mineralogy in 1814, charging him with the task of cataloguing the enormous mineralogical collection of the Comte de Bournon, which was to be moved to Paris from England the following year. Mineralogical investigations, particularly experiments with carbonates and other salts, revealed to Beudant a principle of the combination of mineral substances that he expressed in Beudant's law. Essentially, he found that some compounds dissolved in the same solution would precipitate together, forming a crystal whose properties they determined in common. The interfacial angles of this new crystal would have a value intermediate between the angles of the original compounds, proportional to the quantity of each. Much of this work appears in his "Mineralogie".