Whitney, J. D.; The Metallic Wealth of the United States Described and Compared With That of Other Countries. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co. & London: Trübner & Co., 1854. Large octavo, pp. xxxii, 510. 3 plates, 44 woodcuts.
The work is complete and in the original brown cloth with gilt spine titles and brown end sheets. The binding in tight and exceptionally clean with minor shelf wear to edges. The text is exceptionally clean. Two private ownerships. The work was originally owned by the prominent geologist Horace Vaughn Winchell and a later book plate of the prominent historian of geology H. Stanton Hill. In near fine condition.
Josiah Dwight Whitney (1819-1896) was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, and graduated from Yale in 1839. Following scientific studies in Europe, Whitney was engaged by the American government to survey the mineral lands of the northern peninsula of Michigan which resulted in a two-volume work with two atlases issued as Congressional documents. After the close of the Lake Superior survey he established himself as a consulting mining geologist with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Whitney built a clientele list of prominent figures in North America that gave him the opportunity to acquire information concerning ores, ore deposits, and mining, which he incorporated into his book “Metallic Wealth Of The United States” (1854). The volume became a milestone on ore deposits and a standard reference in the literature of ore deposits. Not only was it a systematic text in the field of ore deposits, it also stimulated serious research on mineral ores and helped to establish mining geology as a scientific discipline.