Petrography in science history

Part 1. From the origin to the microscope advent in the first half of the 19th century

Abstract

This is the former paper related to a research on the chief steps that marked the birth and development of petrography, a science involved in the study of rocks. The first investigations on rocks found their place within the body of Aristotelic and Arab physics and of Natural History, and later, since the 17th century, of both geognosis-geology and mineralogy. The basic principles of this discipline, defined at first as lithology, started to develop only in the first decades of the 19th century, when its autonomous nature was recognized. This time coincides with the increasing availability of data on rock chemistry, and the first observations of rocks under the microscope, an instrument that marked a revolution in the systematic criteria and schemes, adopted until that time for the study of rocks. Due to this reason this paper deals with the time interval starting from the very first scientific treatises on rocks until when the microscope came out; the second paper will be focused on how the research developed starting from the first observations of rock thin sections up to the present time.