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Thursday 26th July saw the launch of SciLogs.com, a new English language science blog network. SciLogs.com, the brand-new home for Nature Network bloggers, forms part of the SciLogs international collection of blogs which already exist in German, Spanish and Dutch. To celebrate this addition to the NPG science blogging family, some of the NPG blogs are publishing posts focusing on Beginnings.

Participatingin this cross-network blogging festival is nature.coms Soapbox Science blog, Scitables Student Voices blog and bloggers from SciLogs.com, SciLogs.de, Scitable and Scientific Americans Blog Network. Join us as we explore the diverse interpretations of beginnings from scientific examples such as stem cellsto first time experiences such as publishing your first paper. You can also follow and contribute to the conversations on social media by using the #BeginScights hashtag. Bora

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Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all. Sir Winston Churchill, British politician (1874 1965)

In the 18th and 19th century collections of natural oddities and specimens were very popular among rich people. Most displayed material was collected by lucky discoverers, assistants or students, only much later also the noble men themselves got into the field, even is such activity was considered more a necessity to gather unique specimens than to understand nature.

The Swiss professor of philosophy Horace-Bndict de Saussure (1740-1799) was one of the first to propose to the savants of the time the necessity to gain also observations and measurements in the field. Savants was a general term adopted simply to well educated people interested in various arts like philosophy and medicine which often included studies of natural phenomena. Natural philosophy included all observable phenomena in nature, from the physiological reaction of the human body on the summit of a mountain to the rocks composing such a mountain. Natural philosophy was only loosely divided in three sub-disciplines- zoology, botany and mineralogy based on the collectable specimens (like animals, plants and minerals).

Fig.1. James Hutton (left) and Joseph Black portrayed as philosophers or early geognosts, caricature published in 1787 by John Kay (Edinburgh).

A much specific approach, to the structure of earth itself, was initiated by a new science emerging from geography and adapted to the necessities of the mining industries to understand better the underground.

In Germany the art called geognosie (earth knowledge) included the description and representation of the surface of earth, like geography, but widened its approach to the third dimension, hidden below the surface of earth. This science was referred also as mineralogical geography or with the french term of gographie souterraine (geography of the underground). Its goals are best understandable in the Italian name anatomia della terra anatomy of earth.

Fig.2. Luigi Ferdinando Marsili On the Structures of Mountains, published in 1705. Early geognosts mapped and developed a classification scheme for the various landscapes observed in nature; however a theory, explaining the formation of these features, was lacking.

Originally posted here:
In the Beginning Was the Word