Arthur Aikin's Mineralogical Survey of Shropshire 1796–1816, and the contemporary audience for geological publications

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Abstract
It has become almost traditional for historians of geology to claim that Roderick Murchison (1792–1871) ‘opened to view for the first time’ the fossiliferous rocks below the Old Red Sandstone which Murchison described in his monumental workThe Silurian Systempublished in 1839. Murchison himself claimed in the introduction to this work ‘no-one was previously aware of the existence below the Old Red Sandstone of a regular series of deposits, containing peculiar organic remains’. Professor John Phillips expressed the traditional view well when he wrote of the larger area of which Shropshire forms a part: ‘practically before the Summer of 1831 the whole field of the ancient rocks and fossils… was unexplored but then arose two men… Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison and simultaneously set to work to cultivate what had been left a desert’. Against this we must set the statement of George B. Greenough (1778–1855), first president of the Geological Society of London, as reported in 1841. He had ‘frequently expressed a conviction, as a result of his own observations…, that adequate enquiry alone was wanting to prove the existence of a succession of strata in the west of England, and in Wales—not less regular than that which had been demonstrated in the centre and east of the Island.’

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