Useful Knowledge: Volume 1. Minerals
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in the history of natural history and early popular science writing
- Teachers, students, and science-history enthusiasts studying nineteenth-century transmission of natural knowledge
- Writers who need public-domain mineralogical texts for comparative reading
- Slow readers who prefer topical excerpt reading over systematic speed-reading
Not a good fit for
- Practical readers seeking modern mineral identification and classification knowledge
- Beginners expecting richly illustrated, intuitive mineral identification
- Professionals needing the latest geological theory and experimental data
Reading tips
- Read it as a historical text: first look at the table of contents for the classification framework, then select mineral entries and compare with modern knowledge.
- Note statements later corrected by modern science as you read, building a record of how knowledge evolved.
- Read alongside modern introductory mineralogy materials to see both old accounts and new knowledge.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
FAQ
Can this book be used to identify minerals?
Why is it called Volume 1 of Useful Knowledge?
What background is needed to read this old English book?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
William Bingley (1774–1823) is an English author about whose life very little has survived; public information is limited, and his nationality, education, and professional career cannot be reliably established. What can be confirmed is that four of his works are held in this collection, all of them informative books written for general readers. The three volumes of Useful Knowledge, devoted respectively to minerals, vegetables, and animals, introduce common natural objects in a systematic way, in plain and orderly prose that prizes clarity and readability. Travels in North America, From Modern Writers draws on the accounts of recent travellers to give English readers an overview of what was being reported about various parts of North America. These works suggest that he excelled at organising and popularising existing knowledge rather than advancing original theories, and that his style was practical and lucid, suited to introductory reading. Judging from the surviving titles, his contribution lies chiefly in compiling natural history and foreign geography into accessible volumes for ordinary readers of his day.
