Buffon's Natural History, Volume 01 (of 10): Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Mineral, &c. &cBuffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de
History
Buffon's Natural History, Volume 01 (of 10): Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Mineral, &c. &c
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de
Natural history
As the denominations I make use of may appear obscure or equivocal, it
is necessary to explain them. By the term _clay_, I mean not only the
white and yellow, but also blue, soft, hard, foliated, and other clays,
which I look on as the scoria of glass, or as decomposed glass. By the
word _sand_ I always understand vitrifiable sand; and not only
comprehend under this denomination the fine sand which produces
freestone, and which I look upon as powdered glass, or rather pumice
stone, but also the sand which proceeds from the freestone destroyed by
friction, and also the larger sand, as small gravel, which proceeds from
the granate and rock-stone, and is sharp, angular, red, and commonly
found in the bed of rivers or rivulets that derive their waters
immediately from the higher mountains, or hills composed of stone or
granate. The river Armanson conveys a great quantity of this sand; it is
large and brittle, and in fact is only fragments of rock-stone, as
calcinable gravel is of freestone. _Rock-stone_ and _granate_ are one
and the same substance, but I have used both denominations, because
there are many persons who make two different species of them. It is the
same with respect to flints and free-stone in large pieces; I look on
them as kinds of granate, and I call them _large flints_, because they
are disposed like calcinable stone in strata, and to distinguish them
from the flints and free-stone in small masses, and the round flints
which have no regular quarries, and whose beds have a certain extent;
these are of a modern formation, and have not the same origin as the
flints and free-stone in large lumps, which are disposed in regular
strata.
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